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Felix turns a page. As he does, he looks up from the book he has been softly reading.
The girls are asleep.
Their blanket rises and falls slowly in the low light from the hearth, and Felix allows himself a tiny smile. Strange, he thinks, how such fragile things could bring him such deep-seated joy.
He retrieves his bookmark from the bedside desk, makes absolutely no noise as he places it halfway on the page, and makes even less noise as he closes the book and returns it to the desk. It takes considerably more effort to get up from the chair and snuff out the candles in silence, but he manages. He moves toward the door.
There is a note on the bookmark. It reads “To Felix and Annette, for Esmerelda and Valerie. I pray that these stories help your children find peace and rest - Seteth.”
There is a second note on the bookmark, with considerably fewer words and considerably more colors. As best Felix can tell, it depicts his wife magically hoisting him into the air while he readies to swing at a giant monster. There is a signature in the form of a fish.
The door opens and closes the narrowest possible amount in order to let Felix exit without excess light entering. He nods to the four handpicked night guards - the four in this hallway, at any rate - and barely waits for them to return the gesture before accepting a candle from one of them and striding down the hallway.
His left hand swings back and forth slightly. Felix frowns, then nods.
It is a young winter’s night in Castle Fraldarius. The moon smiles through cracks in the shuttered window seams, from a far distance well beyond the north chill. Felix has no such luxury. The candle is a poor substitute for a fireplace, but he does not notice.
What he does notice, after descending two flights of stairs and following a familiar sound from the north wing of the castle to the southern one, is that there are no lyrics to Annette’s tune.
Felix stops just short of opening the door to her study. It’s the Fraldarius study, but everyone knows it’s Annette’s study.
The humming continues. It’s less bouncy than what he’s come to expect, more structured, but it’s not unfamiliar. He once asked his wife why her songs didn’t always have words to them, and she asked him why he couldn’t hold a conversation during a good spar. It’s too intense, he needs to focus. Precisely.
So Felix knows before he opens the door that he’s about to begin a strenuous duel for her attention.
“Who- Oh, Felix! Could you shut that please, quickly? Thanks!”
Felix complies and takes in the scene. The hearth is blazing. Annette’s capelet looks like it was once folded neatly, but now hangs precariously from the corner of the stout desk at the center of the room. Books and parchments crowd out the rest of the space, arranged in an incomprehensible manner. Annette produces a magical glyph, smaller than any Felix has seen, and a candle near her hand (nearer still to untold decades of written knowledge) flickers out. She frowns, lifts up a paper to scribble a note on the one underneath, then reignites the candle. She repeats this a few times, sometimes blowing the candle out, sometimes not, sometimes changing which paper she writes on, always making Felix question whether the ink will dry properly. Her hair is disheveled, and there is enough light and heat in the room for Felix to conclude the moisture clinging to the recesses of her outfit are not from a fresh bath.
She looks radiant.
Eventually, Felix clears his throat. “Good evening, dear.”
Annette glances up for a brief “Good evening, darling,” before failing to blow out the candle again, tilting her head, and nodding. She sticks out her tongue to write the latest note down, and Felix melts a little for reasons unrelated to the roaring hearth.
Felix tries again. “Almost done?”
His wife shakes her head. Spell, reaction, scribble. “Still have a lot of trials to go.”
“Oh.” She’s clearly forgotten. Great. “I put Esmer and Val to bed. We have the evening to ourselves, for once.”
Annette smiles at him. “You’re my hero, have I ever told you that?”
“Usually it’s the opposite.”
She rolls her eyes playfully, which is good, but then casts another spell, which is not good.
“Annette.” Felix starts to step around the desk.
“Hm?” Spell, reaction, scribble.
“Do you remember what we had scheduled for tonight?”
Annette pauses. From where he now stands, just over her shoulder, he can make out drawings that aren’t entirely foreign despite his limited grasp of magic. Wind spells. They must be incredibly basic, for him to recognize them so quickly.
“Um…” Felix can hear the scrunch in her face. “Would it be bad if I said no?”
There’s a tiny bit of disappointment that twists through him. She’s been focused, and he’s done worse, but it cuts nonetheless. He’s getting better at recognizing the little cuts, with her help.
For now he masks his sigh and says, “Not necessarily.” He places an ungloved hand on her shoulder. “Would you come to the drawing room with me?”
His wife straightens suddenly, and Felix fights an instinct to catch her. “Oh! Oh. Right, dancing, I completely forgot! I’m so sorry, I just- I received a letter from Lysithea today, and she had some questions for me that I really wanted to find answers to before this weekend. An idea seized me and it seemed tenable, so I started testing and-”
“It’s alright,” Felix frowns as he cuts her short. “But… you do know this weekend isn’t arriving for another five days, right?”
“Five days…” She begins chewing on her lip and muttering. “Tomorrow we host the delegation from Charon while they make use of our military archives, the next three days you’ll be busy running winter drills with the troops and I’ll be making plans for when the King and Queen pass through next moon, and after that we have to oversee preparations for when we take the girls to the Fhirdiad Magic Festival…”
“I still think bringing Val is a stupid idea. She’ll get sick.”
“And I still haven’t forgotten when you decided she was strong enough to hold a sword.”
“That’s different.”
“She is three years old!”
“So was I.”
“Oh, so now you want to be just like your-”
Annette swallows the word, but Felix hears it well enough. Small cut. He bandages it and resolves to get it healed later. Whenever that is.
His wife touches his hand. Grey eyes look up at him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
He avoids the grey. “It’s alright.”
“It’s not though.” The bandage chips. “It’s not fair of me to do that to you. To compare you to him.”
Felix sighs for real now. “And it’s not fair of me to call you stupid for wanting to have both our children close by.”
Annette rubs a thumb across his hand. “Learning moment?”
Felix rubs his hand across her shoulder. “Learning moment.”
There’s a pause. Felix doesn’t quite know how they got here, and he knows less about how to get back to the path he has laid out. His left hand reaches for a sword that isn’t there, because his wife prefers dancing without them.
The hearth in the side wall crackles.
“So… what’s all this?” He gestures with his free hand to the brawling books and the papers drowning amongst themselves.
“Oh!” Annette exclaims for what feels like the dozenth time this evening. She mellows out the fire with a quick spell (thank goodness) and starts shuffling through parchment. “I’m researching the practicality of sustaining low-level wind magic to regulate room temperatures.”
Felix balks. “You want to make Faerghus winters colder ?”
“No, Ordelia you dummy! Lysithea burns up in the summers there.” His wife produces a letter with the crest of House Ordelia stamped at its head. He recognizes the handwriting.
A dark eyebrow arches upward. “Can’t imagine how she manages that.”
Annette scrunches her face at him, and Felix smirks at the way her nose moves.
“Well,” she begins, putting the letter down, “I was going to conduct an efficient series of trials and write back promptly with the results, so that she would have a strong foundation to build from well before summer rolls around. But.”
“But?”
Annette scoots her chair back and stands up. “I’m afraid I will first have to write to inform my dear friend that my research notes will be delayed on account of one notorious villain.”
“Ah. A most uproarious tragedy.” He offers his arm.
“She’ll be devastated.” She accepts, curling her own arm into it.
“Most likely.” He leads them toward the door, and beyond.
(Annette forgets her capelet. Felix considers pointing this out, but swiftly realizes it isn’t worth the risk of losing his wife to the study once again.)
“She’ll devise a rescue mission for me.”
“I’ll foil it.”
“A negotiation?”
“Doesn’t exist if only one party shows up.”
“A siege?”
“In the face of the frigid northern winter? Heh. Don’t make me laugh.”
“Hm… ooh, ooh, perhaps she’ll sneak into the Magic Festival and bewitch you with a never-before-seen spell so that-”
“Will you just-” Felix cuts himself off and shakes his head.
Annette looks at him quizzically. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Felix.”
“Ahem, here we are,” he says, and opens the drawing room door.
Annette is obviously not finished interrogating his train of thought, but as she glances into the warmly lit room, a gasp escapes her and her hands fly to her mouth.
“Annie!” exclaims a thrilled Dorothea as she launches herself at the smaller woman and captures her in a hug. “Oh, I’m so happy to see you! Are you well? Tell me you’re well.”
Felix extracts his arm, and Annette manages to return the hug, still incredulous. “I’m well! Better now that I get to see you, Dorothea. Since when have you been here?”
Dorothea pulls back slightly to smile down at his wife. “Oh, just this afternoon.” She gestures with her head. “Same time as these two.”
In the musicians’ corner of the room, between the fireplace and the piano, Bernadetta and Shamir stand close to two chairs. Each chair holds an instrument - a horn and a violin, respectively.
Annette gasps again. She turns to Felix, wide-eyed. “You- No. You didn’t.”
Felix shrugs.
With a squeak, Annette rushes to Bernadetta in much the same manner Dorothea used to greet her.
“Hey there AaaAAH!” Bernie’s greeting is cut short by a crushing hug that Felix knows firsthand will take a few deep breaths to recover from.
“I can’t believe you’re here! It’s so far away from home for you!” Annette exclaims.
Bernadetta pats her friend on the back to signal that she needs air, and Annette releases her from the vice. Bernie’s reply, after she gathers herself, is soft. “I… travel sometimes. For special occasions.”
Annette beams at her before turning to Shamir, whose expression has not changed during this whole process.
Shamir waves at her.
Annette looks at Felix suspiciously. “This isn’t another mission, is it?”
Felix shakes his head. “It’s not.”
His wife lights back up and turns back to Shamir, but hesitates. They don’t know each other quite as well.
Shamir glances over her in swift appraisal and opens her arms. “I see you’re keeping busy.”
Annette rushes into the hug even as she begins apologizing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you all would be here! I would have changed into some cleaner clothes and made myself more presentable, and sent for tea, and - Felix, how could you do this to me?”
Felix closes in, and Dorothea moves toward the piano bench. “In my defense, you’re the one who decided to perform temperature experiments for hours.”
“You’re evil,” she retorts.
“And you’re grumbling.”
“I am not,” his wife grumbles. She looks back to see the three musicians readying themselves.
“Shamir plays the violin???” she asks a little too loudly.
The woman actually smirks.
So does Felix. “She does, but we’re contractually obligated to tell no one.”
“There’s a contract!?”
Felix grins. “How else do you think I got her to play for us?”
His wife looks at Shamir yet again, who shrugs. “He pays well.”
Annette stifles a giggle. “Bernie, am I sworn to secrecy about you too?”
“I don’t think… I mean, yes! A thousand times yes!”
His wife levels Felix another questioning glance.
“Do you remember those rare plant imports from Brigid we helped fund?”
“Yes…” Annette says slowly.
“Well, consider this a return on the investment.”
“Unbelievable…” She glances at Dorothea, who smiles broadly.
“Come now Annie, you know I would never turn down an invitation like this. Even if I did have to negotiate travel expenses.” She winks at Felix, who sighs.
“Don’t listen to her, I’m paying her for her time as well.”
Felix turns his attention back to Annette, who seems to be looking inward. There’s a confused expression on her face, like she can’t remember where she last put something. He fights a temptation to see if the tongue will re-emerge in time.
“What’s wrong?” Felix asks.
“Hm?” She meets his eyes. “Oh, nothing’s wrong, I just don’t know what the occasion is.”
Felix offers his hand. “There’s no occasion.”
Annette takes it. “Then why go to all the trouble of bringing everyone here? Surely it wasn’t as easy as they make it sound.”
Felix settles his other hand against her shoulder blade, and Annette fits her arm over his. “It was no trouble, really.” A thought occurs to him. “You’re not injured, are you?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“And you still love dancing, right?”
“Of course I do, it’s just that…”
“The kids are asleep? I requested quiet songs, and we’re half a castle away.”
“No, none of that!”
Felix grows quiet. Dorothea is waiting for his signal to start playing, and Bernadetta and Shamir are waiting on Dorothea. He has no doubt the three of them hear all of this.
He listens. Annette breathes. The fire flickers.
Her voice is quiet when she speaks next, like a winter wind. “Felix, you’re very sweet. But you didn’t have to do all this for my sake.”
Felix inhales slowly, then exhales. “Well, I did. And I don’t regret it for a moment. Now will you just-”
He cuts himself off at the same point as before, and looks away. He feels Annette shift to look for him, and decides he’s done enduring cuts for no reason tonight.
He finds the grey. “Will you just let me love you already?”
Annette’s face grows incredibly flush and takes on a curious expression. Her face is strained, but she could be smiling. She hastily nods.
Felix lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, and nods to Dorothea. Her eyes appraise the pair of them for a moment, but then she relents, smiles, and straightens her posture on the piano bench. A key is struck.
A floating arpeggio.
And then music begins in earnest. Light, relaxed, warm and sweet.
Felix gently leads. Small steps. It’s barely a dance, especially for someone as able-bodied as him, but they’re close, so very, very close, and they’re moving together, and that’s enough.
Annette sighs, nestles her head into his shoulder, and the dance goes on.