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The first time it happened was during the Horsebow Moon and Felix only allowed it because Sylvain was in mourning.
He tells himself it’s a one time deal as well, even though he knows, better than anyone else, that the concept of once is lost on Sylvain. It was a wasted effort for the both of them for Felix to come up with a list of reasons why he was doing this. Still, there was no way he was going to find the composure to stand there and pretend, like always, that he was doing Sylvain a big favor with no benefit at all to himself without something to back up his farce.
“You’re causing even more of a disruption than usual with your lechery.”
“You’re falling behind in your training. Your carelessness could get others killed.”
“I hate looking at your face when you’re miserable. It’s annoying.”
These were his top three choices—consistent with the character of the comments he made to Sylvain on most of the days they’ve spent together. However, none of those things, nor the weaker statements he’d mentally tacked below them in the case of an extended conversation, were what he ended up saying as soon as Sylvain answered the door.
Sylvain’s nose and cheeks were red. His tears were not quite dried. His usual mussy hair was in even greater disarray, all compressed on one side, indicating he’d been lying down in the same position for a long time. He didn’t wipe his eyes when he saw Felix. He didn’t smile or crack one of his stupid flirtatious lines like he did whenever anybody dropped by. He was raw and completely unguarded and Felix wasn’t sure that was a look he’d ever seen on his friend.
Sylvain stood in the middle of the doorway for a few seconds too long, looking right through Felix as if he were a part of the wall. The first three buttons of his shirt were undone and Felix could see the tip of jagged pink tissue peeking out at him. It looked less painful than whatever demons Sylvain was fighting underneath the skin, but it caught Felix’s attention in a way that was more genuine than any of the excuses he came up with.
He stepped forward, placing a palm on Sylvain’s shoulder, startling him from his stupor, and took the liberty of closing the door behind him.
“Syl. Let me see.”
Sylvain nodded, unbuttoning the shirt even further and letting it hang open for Felix to inspect. He stood by the window, the cool fall breeze blowing his hair and the loose fabric freely in whatever direction it dictated as it’s destination. Sylvain seemed so fragile under the weight of its whistling. Felix huffed as he closed it. It was distracting him from his purpose.
Felix knows what it’s like to lose a brother—if you could call Miklan that. Sylvain did, and it’s not his business to argue, regardless of what he saw Miklan do to him. Despite what people may say, Sylvain isn’t heartless, he’s hardened. Felix understands that. He didn’t have to see the mask removed to decide to stay, but once he had, there was no way he could leave.
For once, it was him that pulled Sylvain toward the bed, seating him closer than common sense would suggest. For once, it was him who used his hands to initiate tenderness instead of violence, muttering the basic incantation of a heal spell despite the obvious redundancy of the act. Sylvain leaned over his shoulder and pulled his hair free from its tie, his fingers working the knots from its length like they were as easy to fix as the knots in his throat, and Felix told himself he’d permit it—once.
Once—that word which meant nothing to Sylvain, yet so much to him. Once betrayed Felix as he continued to play right into the expectant hands of more and again.
Sylvain pushed his luck each time Felix came to comfort him. He drew their bodies closer, his touches grew bolder, his breath hotter on the shell of Felix’s ear as he stroked the navy hair from root to tip until it was smooth and shining. It wasn’t long before it became the first thing he did, whisking them to the bed and layering his trembling hands with the sheen of midnight tresses, the hitches in their breathing revealing a truth unspoken.
Felix was scared. Sylvain scared him, and he somehow wasn’t able to be pissed off about it, which is where he had always defaulted. He couldn’t rely on that filter anymore when it came to how he felt about his friend’s hands twisting through the little hairs at the edge of his nape, cradling the back of his skull like he was something so small and priceless. The burn of callouses forged by the years of spear handling sparked lines that seemed so specific when Sylvain stroked him; it was as if he was branding an invisible crest of Gautier only the future Margrave could perceive when he sunk his fingers into his skin.
Anger is an easy way to cover your fear when you don’t know the cause of it, but once you do, you can’t ignore the reality forever. Felix was not actually afraid of love. He remembers it, distantly, though never like this. What he was most afraid of was being seen.
It’s the same fear they share, he realized. Felix looks at the ground, or the sky, or anywhere but someone else’s eyes. He looks down at others with the assistance of a sword pointed at their neck. Sylvain looks right through the people he claims to care for, even if it’s true, always acting like there isn’t a fury within that could shatter everything around him along with his persona made of glass. They do anything but look at one another.
By the end of the Guardian Moon, he decides it has to stop. Even if it ruins everything, Felix needs to put an end to their avoidance. He’ll do so tonight.
Their private grooming sessions have been going on long enough that he’s accustomed to seeing Sylvain in various states of dress and undress. Sylvain’s bare chest when he opens the door shouldn’t make his breath catch in his throat. He shouldn’t be surprised at the heat that floods his body when Sylvain grabs his hand and leads him inside.
Felix has never visited Sylvain this late before. A strange and unwelcome desperation overtook him—he can’t explain it. The phantom pain of Sylvain’s fingernails scratching his scalp has been enough to keep him awake until the godless hours of the night. His own hands brushing through the kinks isn’t enough anymore. He’s not sure when that happened.
He couldn’t figure out how to breathe properly, much less settle in to sleep. There was nowhere else he could go at a time like this other than straight to the source of the problem.
“Sylvain.”
Sylvain hums, slowing his stroking, shifting his face more to the side so that Felix can almost see it—but not quite. He’s practically in Felix’s lap at this point. His weight is sure to make them topple over if he keeps this up. Felix finds he doesn’t have even the slightest urge to push him away.
“I…like this.”
Sylvain’s hands curl perhaps a little tighter and deeper into Felix’s hair. One of them sits, large and mostly immobile, at the very tips, as if he was trying to prevent them from crawling downward and escaping from his grasp. He’s trying to hold it all together, but he’s going about it in the wrong way.
“I like it too, Fe. I like it a lot.”
Felix can hear his honesty in every twitch of his muscles. He wants Sylvain to move his hands everywhere, to touch him like he’s touched nobody else before, not with lust, chasing a thrill with an inevitable end, but like the beginning of a journey, unexplored, unmitigated and unsure.
“Lay down with me?”
Sylvain’s invitation is a step in the right direction—a path they’ve tread before. It’s been a while since he’s nestled himself under the canopy of Sylvain’s sheets. It’s taken time to rebuild the trust that is Felix’s head on his best friend’s chest. The pounding of his heart in Felix’s ear stirs the storm.
“Ok.”
It’s better, a thousand times so, to be able to look at Sylvain while he continues his ministrations. It’s the same hands, the same practice they’d both come to expect. Yet, he’d never seen the way Sylvain looked while he did it, and that changed everything. Sometimes, all it takes is a different perspective.
“Felix. What are we doing?”
His eyes are pensive and brighter than the stars that Felix has his back to at the moment. Felix doesn’t want to know what his own eyes look like. If they’re anything like how Sylvain is making him feel, he hopes he never has to see them. The tightness in his chest is a stone he still tries to swallow, even as Sylvain’s feather light touches make his body float high above the water his instincts demand he drown in.
Felix can’t fly away with him just yet.
“We’re laying down in your bed.” He grumbles, hoping that he doesn’t give away how unsteady Sylvain’s question has already made him.
Sylvain sighs and moves the hand that covets Felix’s charcoal tips to his shoulder instead. Dry, cracked fingers dance their way up to the corner of his chin, thumb rubbing the side of his cheek.
“I want to kiss you.”
Felix’s next breath is the most dizzying he’s taken in his entire life. There doesn’t seem to be any pretense in Sylvain’s words or his actions, and even though Felix has certainly overheard him making that same declaration to women many times before, what is new is not just in the fact that it is Felix Sylvain is saying it to, but in the way his body gives him context.
Sylvain is afraid—hesitant. His fingers continue to move, brushing all along Felix’s face, creasing by the crown of his head, under his eyes and up and down the ridges of his nose. It would appear like he is merely trying to set a sensual mood, but Felix knows better, because he feels him trembling through it, and the apprehension over something he’s normally so confident about is what tells the swordsman that Sylvain is in love with him.
Felix doesn’t react. He can’t—not when Sylvain is like this, not when his thumb ends up pressing into the part of his lips to be warmed by the inconsistent pattern of his breath. Sylvain waits patiently for Felix to to indicate any sort of response and when he doesn’t receive anything but an embarrassed cough, he scoots closer, pressing their foreheads together.
“Will you let me do that, Fe?”
Felix wants to let him do that, but will he? The feeling of Sylvain’s hands on his face and in his hair was just a small taste from the banquet in front of him and the hunger hastened by his preening had long since made him delirious. Sylvain had looked at him—no, not at or through, but inside of him—and crept closer instead of crawling away. If Sylvain could be the first to do so, then Felix could, just this once, allow himself to do the same.
“No.”
Sylvain’s face begins to crumple before morphing into an expression of confusion as Felix removes his hand from his face and places it back into his hair, threading the fingers into the exact spots that most please him. A hitch in Sylvain’s breathing and a shudder when Felix closes the remaining distance nearly presses their lips together accidentally, but Felix manages to stop it inches before the penultimate crash.
“Don’t stop what you were doing. Let me instead.”
It starts off as the softest thing Felix has ever tried. Felix doesn’t generally know how to handle soft. It only reminds him of how simple some things are to break. Sylvain licks into his mouth, slowly at first, then deeper, wetter, hotter. His hands tangle in his hair instead of unfurl it. He pulls at it, roughly, and Felix discovers he likes that touch as well—especially when accompanied by the swirl of Sylvain’s tongue on his neck. His shivers don’t feel like a weakness. It feels like security. It feels like rest.
“Felix—Fe..”
Sylvain panting his name against every bare inch of his skin that he can reach emboldens him. Felix rolls over, climbing atop the scarlet peaked mountain, returning the gesture in full. Sylvain’s scar, the final mark Miklan gave him, shines by aid of the dim moonlight. It doesn’t stop Felix from stroking everything that can be touched. He runs his fingernails down Sylvain’s abdomen, imitating the dozens of times he’d felt so alive underneath the careful undulations—fire and electricity identical twins in his left and right hands.
Sylvain’s own hands have since ceased moving. He stares up at Felix with a twinkling in his eyes but his pleasure is gathered in the balling of his fists, stuck and tensing and just removed from the back of Felix’s head. It’s as if he’s worried a single snap of a strand will cause the spell to dissipate.
Felix reaches behind to place a palm over one of them, pushing their combined weight into the widest point of his skull. He needs to feel Sylvain there, through everything he does, not just this.
“I told you not to stop.”
Sylvain makes a desperate noise, his eyebrows quavering to prevent the full admission of desire, as if that wasn’t already apparent by multiple accounts.
“You want me to..?”
“Yes,” Felix interrupts, yanking Sylvain’s hair so he can guide his mouth to latch back on to his neck. “Sylvain—Yes.”
Sylvain sits up, pulling Felix’s legs around him and dipping him down in one fluid motion. Felix squeaks disgracefully before he is settled vertically again, Sylvain’s hands tracing familiar patterns against his scalp. His laugh is short and shaky from heightened emotions and the shallow breaths he’d been taking, but it tickles Felix’s ear all the same.
He gathers all the strands together, letting the silk fall as slowly as they can through the slots in his fingers. The rumbling of Sylvain’s chest pressed firm against him causes a boiling need in Felix’s gut. Felix holds on for dear life, fighting the urge to move, to draw his own fingers down between their bodies and choose a fork where the routes divide. The intimacy of this cannot be rushed- they cannot afford a single misstep.
Sylvain places a chaste kiss on the side of his head, nuzzling his nose into the full bodied tremor Felix releases. “I’m the only one who gets to see you like this—Am I right?”
Felix nods, unsure if it will stand out through all of the trembling.
“So beautiful…your hair down like this, your body filling my arms, ass warm on my lap.”
Felix growls lowly at the pass, but falters as Sylvain begins to stroke him again. One hand busies itself playing with his bangs, brushing them back and continuing in a line until he reaches the end of his strands, then starts again. The other hand wanders south at a snail’s pace until it’s teasing beyond the small of his back.
“You have no idea, what you’ve done to me, all this time—do you?”
Felix shakes his head and acquiesces to Sylvain’s sudden demand to remove his shirt. It’s thrown somewhere off to the side, not folded and placed impeccably on a high, empty, surface to prevent any wrinkling like he knows Sylvain is in the habit of doing. Tonight, Sylvain’s eyes are focused only on him.
Sylvain’s fingers twist Felix’s hair into a bun held high and loose by tendons and joints and flesh instead of worn leather. Felix can feel the flush on his face, imagine the way his mouth parts as he tries his best not to pant or admit to any of the pathetic noises his lungs prepare with every fresh round of his breath.
“Sweetheart—Oh. Look at you.”
Felix obviously cannot, and will not separate from the long sought victory of their conjoined bodies to twist around and find the mirror to check, but he sees enough of his reflection in Sylvain’s widened eyes to know.
He trusts it to be enough, and finally lets go.
His best friend’s thumbs find the divots of his hips and even the slight pressure he applies there is enough to convince Felix that they will need to come up with a different title for who they are and what they mean to one another very soon.
“I want to make you feel good, Felix—Darling. Can I?”
Felix reclines, sliding off Sylvain’s lap and creating the space they’ll need to proceed along the course they’ve arrived at.
“You may.”
He guides Sylvain’s hands a final time, the four of them together pulling more delicately at the laces of his smalls than even one could have in the months before the first time Felix came knocking down the door.
“Just this once.”