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The most delightful of books in Garreg Mach’s library, Claude is fairly certain, are the forbidden fruit Seteth keeps padlocked out of the students’ immediate sight. Meant to look like just another bookshelf, the trick door to the hidden depths has a lock hidden in one of its books. Claude figured it out when he picked up the most boring-looking title, flipped open the cover, and found a hollow block of wood staring him back with a tiny lock looped between it and the bookshelf’s frame.
Now, if only Claude could think of a way to finesse said key off of Seteth’s belt, which he’s never seen the guy let out of his sight, let alone off his person—
“Oh, Claude! Did you find them?”
Claude catches himself before he jumps. He forces his body to slump into something casual, turning on one heel to shoot a clandestine glance in his new shadow’s direction.
Sylvain Gautier, heir apparent of one Lance of Ruin, gives Claude a rather fiendish grin.
Claude, for his part, pretends to keep up. “Not yet.”
“You don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
Claude’s brows raise as Sylvain traipses past him, plucking Seteth’s fake book off the fake bookshelf. Sylvain busies himself with it as if real information was written on this dusty old brick, its false spine labelled Political Behavior in the 7th Century Peacetime, about as juicy as a dried-out date.
Sylvain regards his book, a little smile pulling at one end of his mouth. “Tomas said that all the art books were around the corner, but I didn’t find a single topic I was looking for in there.”
“Aw, no naughty pictures?”
Claude wasn’t expecting the clap of laughter he’s rewarded with. Still, when Sylvain raises his head, his eyes meet Claude’s head-on, a steely, reforged sienna. “Not a one! I checked the whole shelf.” He furls his hand into a fist and knocks it against the false book. “Figured Seteth must be keeping them all to himself.”
“Now, that’s a thought.” Claude doesn’t hold back his chuckle, and Sylvain’s eyes lower, as if chasing the sound. “Unless he’s burning them to a crisp for his own amusement?”
Sylvain gasps in horror. “And destroy sacred works of art? He wouldn’t do that. Not for art!”
For art. Claude snorts.
“So,” Sylvain continues, “how do we get in?”
“That, my friend, is one of Garreg Mach’s seven wonders.”
How does one break into the last place Seteth wants students roaming around?
Somehow, the underside of Seteth’s iron bed frame doesn’t carry a single mote of dust on its sleek, wrought surface.
The floor’s hard, of course, and cold, which isn’t surprising, but Claude’s come to realize that he is about to become deeply uncomfortable.
Any other plan, unfortunately, won’t see him pocketing Seteth’s keys anytime soon, so: Uncomfortable, he shall be.
“Hey,” whispers the warm body on his other side, scuffing the floor as he wriggles, trying and failing to find a more neutral position to lie in. “How long, would you say, till Flayn comes back and gets him to bed?”
Claude huffs out a near-laugh. If nothing else, he’d say he has a pretty keen eye for kindred spirits, and if Seteth’s caught more than a couple hours of sleep in the past few nights, they’re lucky. Or maybe unlucky, because if he has been sleeping well, then he’s less likely to rest tonight.
And they’re kind of banking on Seteth falling asleep sometime before sunrise. Their entire operation’s hinged on it.
Claude determines to be an optimist. “Few hours, maybe? Why? You ready to call it quits?”
Sylvain hesitates. “Didn’t he lock the door before he left?”
“Well, there’s always the window.”
“Then he’ll know for sure we were in here!”
Claude wouldn’t put it past Seteth to figure it out on his own, broken window or no. “It’s just an option. In case, say, we start to freeze down here.”
It is morgue-frigid in Seteth’s room. Has the man carried even a single warm thought in his miserable existence?
All of a second of silence leads Claude to think Sylvain won’t say it before he blurts, “I mean. There are also other other options.”
Claude plays dumb. “Such as?”
“Such as you. And me.”
“And..?”
“And… if we breathe on each other really hard.”
Claude nearly chokes.
He’s sort of wondered about him—Sylvain. How he talks to girls. How he doesn’t talk to guys. How when Claude flashes him a wink, Sylvain seems to catch it and reflect his exuberance back. Empty smiles. Glass castles. Another warm body, lying close enough to touch, if Claude dares to stretch out his fingers.
Claude can barely see him. Just his outline, angles. The blushing fire of his curly hair, drenched in shadows as deep as twilight.
Certainly not the ugliest man Claude could be lying beside under Seteth’s bed.
Under here, too, he can smell the edges of Sylvain’s honeyed scent. There’s not much else to keep him occupied, besides the stinging cleanliness of Seteth’s polished floors. Yet as time wears on, ever-impassive, Claude doesn’t seem to grow used to it; rather, the feel of Sylvain shifts, grows warmer, brighter. More enticing.
…At least Sylvain is funny. It’s the only thing Claude’s got to while away the time.
So he poses, “Where should I breathe? On your face? Your toes? But then, how am I going to reach your toes without bumping my head?”
Sylvain snorts, and Claude ignores the zing of warmth that shoots through him. “I dunno—practice?”
Claude’s about to creep over to him and test his joke through when the door clunks into place. They both freeze, eyes locked.
It’s all Claude can do to slowly, carefully lower himself back down, his breaths as quiet as he knows how to make them. He strains to listen past the terrible thumping of his heart, to catch the clasp of boots on stone. Sylvain is nearly silent, but his exhales yank out knife-sharp, and Claude is convinced, cold jewels of sweat beading at his temple, that those footsteps will keep drawing closer and closer and closer until Seteth’s hand crawls down the bed’s underside and sinks into Claude’s shirt.
Instead, his pace halts with the pointed poise of an instructor, and he marches toward the other end of the room.
This goes on for longer than Claude can keep count.
Then, with a heaving finality, Seteth slumps over his desk at the far end of the room, his form sinking into the crackling leather of his chair.
For the first time since Seteth came in, Claude risks a glance at Sylvain. He’s white-knuckled his own hands together, his eyes as pale as sin, mouth dangling half-open.
Claude almost bursts out laughing; schooling himself, he raises his own hand, presses his index finger to Sylvain’s open mouth, and whispers shhhhhhh.
Sylvain actually flinches. Impressively, he makes no sound.
Seteth must not hear Claude, because he doesn’t kick over his bed and kill the both of them for this utter breach of his privacy.
Time becomes measured in breaths, in the cold tingle behind Claude’s fingers and the staccato of his heartbeat. He has no idea how long it’s been, only that Seteth’s still scritch-scritching away with his quill, and that the monotony is numbing his mind into a dangerously restful lull.
Eventually, out of desperation or worry or some baser instinct, he snatches Sylvain’s hand and begins tapping a low, predictable tempo against his palm with his thumb.
He’s half-convinced Sylvain’s clammy hand will wrench from his, but then Sylvain taps his palm in reply, keeping up.
He’s cold, too. They’re both freezing. Seteth is a madman, living in this chill.
But it’s all they can do to hold onto one another—to hold on and to wait and to use their hands as some form of communication too rudimentary to share anything more meaningful than I’m here, you’re here.
It might very well be morning when Claude hears the low clack of Seteth’s shoes shifting on the stone floor. Then a stretch, a series of bones popping, and a yawn—so even Seteth feels exhaustion, he marvels—and the whisper of heavy regal attire sliding off overwrought shoulders.
And the low groan of the mattress, and the bed coming to life as a warm body lowers itself to inhabit it, followed by the bright clink of keys dropping onto a bedside table and the exhaled kiss of a candle blowing out.
And Sylvain’s muscles jerk as he threatens to fly to his feet.
Claude squeezes his hand with a wordless warning: he can’t just say he’s not asleep yet without stirring the one just above them, mere breadths away.
Somehow—Somehow—Sylvain understands him, and he grips Claude’s hand tight, and he waits.
And Claude listens, using what he’s honed from older siblings who hated him in the dark, from a kingdom he hasn’t seen in years. He listens as Seteth’s breathing falls into a steady rhythm, and his breaths grow laden, deeper, until Claude risks a gentle tap against the bed post with his toe. Seteth doesn’t stir.
Then his hand relaxes, the tension bleeding from his body, and Claude realizes he’s still holding onto Sylvain. Quickly, he lets go, whispering, “We’re clear.”
Claude feels Sylvain tense, but Seteth remains dead to the world—and so it’s with a terribly relieved sigh that he crawls out on his side under Seteth’s bed, and Claude does his.
Claude stands, stretching out his stiff, sore limbs, then swiftly palms Seteth’s keys before Sylvain reaches him.
They pace through the Monastery like sentries, the world silent and still but for ghosts, and pass the key ring from hand to hand. Its metal catches reflections of fire from still-lit torches in the halls, and as it jingles in midair, Claude thinks he hears the cries of the desert bird as it deftly avoids its predator’s teeth.
It takes half of Seteth’s keyring and a series of muffled swears before the lock gives in and the false bookshelf swings out like a door. Claude swipes a lantern, their only form of light through the echoing hall that tunnels down, down, down through the calm sanctuary of the library.
Partway through the spiraling stairwell, Sylvain stumbles, and Claude catches him. Neither of them breathe a word about how suddenly their bodies fit together, how Claude feels something like a latch in the base of his skull.
At the bottom of all these corridors lies a small cage of a room. They have to pass the lantern between one another to make sense of the shadows, and eventually they pick out ancient, time-untouched shelves laden with rows and rows of books of all kinds. Awed, Claude runs his finger along their spines, some thick and pristine, some finer than his fingernail.
Sylvain finds a stack of pamphlets showcasing deeds that make him burn as red as his hair. His gaze drifts from the literature to Claude, then back again, so quick that Claude can hazard Sylvain thinks himself furtive. But Claude saw—that, and the slight tremor of his lips when he forces them back together.
Claude ignores the tingling in his palms. He asks for the lantern, and he parts the forbidden sea of tomes with his other hand, searching. He needs to find just the right one…
He skims spines and cover pages, lushly-illustrated pictures and ornately-calligraphed chapters. He knows he works on borrowed time; Sylvain can only stuff so many of his ratty finds between his belt and trousers. The moon is lowering on its haunches, and Claude can feel it.
Then Claude sees it, glowing a sour gold in the gloom, its cover tarnished in a midnight oil that could be ink, could be blood.
Its embossed title shines an infernal white light when he draws the lantern close.
Ashimmer, it reads, Theories on the Immortal Soul of Nemesis.
There’s something about the texture of the book. Something about the smell. Something about the fact that Seteth could wake up at any second.
This book screams evil.
Claude finds it in his hands.
Sylvain gives it one glance—one part intrigued, one part wary—and they walk toward the exit.
Their hands find one another’s in the darkness.
With their finds safely sequestered, there is only one place left to go.
“Morning’s gotta come soon, right?” Sylvain breathes into the tight space between them.
“Any moment now…”
Claude only needs to stay awake for a couple more hours at most, and then they’ll be out from under Seteth’s bed, the man none the wiser.
They could have left the keyring lying on Seteth’s bedside table, his rooms unlocked for no apparent reason, but that would mean giving Seteth a reason to suspect every single person in the Monastery, and if there’s even a slim chance Claude could lose his findings, he won’t risk it.
Besides, it can’t be much longer…
And so, they wait, in the cold, in the dark. Wait for Seteth to wake and depart from his lair, wait for a chance to sneak out as they had come in.
It seems the night has sanded down his inhibitions, though. His mind keeps floating back to Sylvain’s eyes, bright in the dark, chasing Claude’s—his breath tight, his face flushed as he faces the man and not the paintings in front of him.
And by the earth, Claude is so cold. His teeth are practically chattering.
So it’s only natural that he would seek out a way to make it stop. That he would find the only other warmth in the room and cling to it.
He feels Sylvain’s breath tickle his cheek. Sylvain’s heart pounds, oddly solemn against Claude’s side. He’s quiet, too, but his arms rest around Claude, and his head’s tilted so his soft hair brushes Claude’s face.
Claude forgets to say, You need to breathe on me a little harder. He forgets to make it a joke.
He forgets, because he blinks, and with terrifying swiftness, the dawn comes streaming in slats through a faraway window, and the ground is slathered in sunlight, and Claude’s back aches from how he’s been dragged out from under the bed, and—
Seteth’s hands are almost at his throat.
“What in the—heavens—Claude, I can’t begin to understand this—this disrespect!—and, who do I write to, oh—Sylvain!—Sylvain, your father is receiving a very strongly-worded letter from me—Why, the nerve, I simply, I fail to understand—”
Seteth pauses, to breathe in.
In that moment, Sylvain raises his head, his mouth coming unstuck from where his chin had fallen while tucked against Claude’s face.
Pressed to his skin.
Seteth’s face darkens to an alarming shade of purple. “You—S-Such uncouth behavior, under my bed—!”
Claude is afraid his own face might share the color. Because he notices, now, the lack of Sylvain’s mouth. His skin quite actually aches for it to return.
An oddly tantalizing dread washes over him when he realizes he is going to be staring at Sylvain for all of their forthcoming detention hours.
Dread, temptation, want. As sweet as the forbidden fruit.