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Sylvain sees Felix fall from halfway across the battlefield.

There are so many men between them. Men, and horses, and what feels like a mile of horrible marsh as well; acres of squelching mud that sucks boots and hooves alike down into it and has been making movement in formation almost impossible.

He’d gotten separated from Felix back at the start of the fighting, just like he always does. It’s inevitable: Sylvain is always on a horse and Felix is always on foot.

Sylvain is used to looking for him. Picking Felix out of a crowd is as practiced as his letters, as the route from Fhirdiad to Gautier, as his most winning smile.

If you asked him on a particularly sentimental day, Sylvain might say he’d recognize him blind.

Even though Sylvain sees him fall it’s not clear, with the distance between them, what’s happened. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Felix goes down, swift as a stalk of wheat cut by a scythe, and doesn’t get up again. Everything narrows to that.

Sylvain doesn’t think he breathes until he’s carved his way through the men separating them—dozens or hundreds, he doesn’t even notice, they’re nothing, they crumple before him, faceless, like so many paper cutouts—and hurled himself down off his horse.

The man Felix was last fighting is sprawled on the ground nearby without a head, not looking like much of a threat. Sylvain drops to his knees in the frigid mud next to him. He grasps Felix’s shoulders and rolls him over, hauling him bodily up into his lap.

There’s grime smeared on Felix’s face and his eyes are closed, but he’s breathing, shallow yet distinct, and at the thud of his heartbeat beneath Sylvain’s palm Sylvain feels his own shudder back to life in his chest.

Felix’s eyes drag open, big and out of focus. “Felix,” Sylvain murmurs, cupping his face with one gloved hand. “I’ve got you. Hey, I’ve got you, you’re okay. Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere,” Felix says. It comes out hoarse. He squeezes his eyes shut tight again, turning his head to the side. “It’s...Sylvain, it’s…”

Sylvain is already ripping off his gloves to pat him down, head and chest and abdomen, feeling for any injuries. But search as he might, none of the blood drying on Felix’s clothes seems to be his own.

He’s wholly lost any sense of the battle around them, so it’s good to note absently that everything in their immediate vicinity is going quiet. The fighting has moved away from the center.

The Empire general must not recognize a lost cause when she sees one. When Sylvain does take minimal stock of their surroundings and glance over his shoulder, he spies her cornered by Ashe and Dedue off near the edge of the forest with her few remaining soldiers, unwilling to surrender.

Sylvain can’t even think of helping. It’s very obvious they don’t need him. This day has been an uneven slaughter start to finish, and he won’t leave Felix.

Felix, who is becoming more alert now, squirming restlessly. The movement presses him up into Sylvain’s searching hands. A nonverbal message for him to stop, maybe. Sylvain doesn’t. It’s encouraging that he’s talking and moving, and Sylvain still can’t find an injury, but it’s Felix. Felix wouldn’t fall from nothing.

Something’s wrong, Sylvain knows it is. He just can’t figure out what it is, and panic is clawing its way up his throat as the seconds slide past.

When Sylvain grazes fingertips over Felix’s sweaty forehead, checking for a cut or bruise, he feels that he’s burning up, and his alarm only grows. A fever? But how could it hit so suddenly? Felix had been fine that morning.

“Sylvain,” Felix says again, and the tone is different this time, pleading.

It’s shocking, the desperation audible in the two syllables of his name. Hearing them in Felix’s voice. It makes Sylvain stop his searching and really look at him.

He’s opened his mouth to ask Felix something when the air clears enough around them, in the midst of the horses and smoke and bodies, that Sylvain catches his scent.

Everything slots into place and the pieces of the puzzle he’s been struggling with are laid out plainly in order before him as he realizes, too late, what’s happening.

“Oh, Felix,” he whispers, horrified, looking down at the desperate, honey-dark eyes staring up at him. He cradles Felix’s face with one hand, rubs a thumb up over his cheekbone. “Oh, no. How—”

It’s as far as he gets before Felix’s scent grows stronger and Sylvain breaks off, shuddering all over. It hits him like a ton of bricks, overpowers all rational thought, makes the words die in his mouth. He forgets whatever he was going to ask.

Felix smells like his.

“Please,” Felix says, sounding as if he’s choking the single word out. He curls unsteady fingers around Sylvain’s wrist, turning his whole body in towards him like a closed parenthesis. “Sylvain—”

I can’t believe he just said please. “What is it?” Sylvain asks, low. “What do you need?” He slides one arm around Felix, helping him sit upright. Felix needs a lot of help. He doesn’t seem to have full control of his limbs and he’s shivering all over, even though he’s practically radiating heat.

He smells so good. Like he was made just for Sylvain. Sylvain feels dizzy with it.

Felix exhales and curls up against him. He presses his face to the juncture between Sylvain’s neck and his gorget, breathing in deep. “Get me out of here,” he says into Sylvain’s shoulder, voice raw.

He sounds scared. Felix never sounds scared. “You have to—” he starts, but he breaks off on a shudder and turns his face further into Sylvain’s chest. Sylvain can feel himself leaning into him, curving protectively around him, wanting to gather him up as close as he possibly can.

He curls a steadying hand in Felix’s battle-sweaty hair. It feels very right to touch him, even more so than usual. Sylvain needs to keep touching him, it’s very important. He needs to touch more of him, he needs to never stop.

No. No. He breaks through the fog with difficulty. What he needs to do is get Felix off the battlefield before Sylvain’s personal catastrophe becomes a catastrophe for the entire Kingdom army.

“Come on,” he says, gritting his teeth, awkwardly trying to push up to his knees. It’s difficult when allowing any space at all to come between them feels like severing a limb. “Hold onto me, okay?”

It’s unnecessary, because Felix already is, but the crown of his head brushes Sylvain’s chin as he nods. “I’m going to pick you up,” Sylvain says, low, and Felix nods again. Sylvain feels it like a punch to the gut. Felix’s ordinary response to the threat of being picked up would likely be stabbing. Sylvain had never thought he would miss that.

He adjusts his arms so that one is slid around Felix’s back and the other is tucked up under his bent knees. Sylvain looks down at him, then: to make sure that he’s awake, that he knows what’s happening. That this is still permissible.

“Felix?” he murmurs, and Felix blinks his eyes open again to look up at him through disheveled dark bangs. They’re plastered to his forehead from exertion. A good bit of his hair is matted with drying blood.

Felix’s gaze has gone somewhat dreamy; he has to blink several times to focus on Sylvain this time. His mouth is slightly parted. Sylvain’s eyes catch on his plush lower lip, on the red lines scored there from Felix’s own teeth.

It would be so easy to tip Felix’s head back, to capture his mouth, to kiss the desperation out of them both.

Felix is watching his mouth, now, looking less dreamy and more hungry. Like maybe he wants him to. Like maybe he would let him.

“Felix!”

Sylvain snaps his head up. Dimitri’s joined them, ramming his lance spear-end first into the muddy ground nearby as he approaches on foot. His one good eye roves over them both, Sylvain on his knees with Felix in his arms. His expression shifts from concern to outright panic. “Sylvain, what—”

He realizes the situation they’re in more quickly than Sylvain had, stiffening all over as he comes close enough to smell the pheromones Felix is giving off.

Belatedly, Sylvain realizes he should have tried harder to clear his head enough to heed Felix’s warning. He should have already taken him far away from here. He’s hardly the only alpha within shouting distance. Of course he wouldn’t be the only one to notice what’s happened.

Dimitri’s eyeteeth look longer than they had a moment ago when he opens his mouth to say, wobbly, “Goddess. He’s—”

He can’t seem to finish the sentence, from shock or from something else maybe, and Sylvain understands the feeling. He hasn’t been able to form the words aloud either, obvious and irrefutable as they are.

He’s in heat. Felix is in heat.

Felix is an omega.

All these years and they’d all thought—he’d let them think—that he was a beta. He’d never presented and so everyone had just assumed, in the way people did.

Sylvain doesn’t even think he’d ever asked outright. He hadn’t thought he needed to. The lack of alpha or omega characteristics spoke for itself, and every time Sylvain even skirted the subject Felix snapped at him to within an inch of his life. Not that that wasn’t fun, there were just much easier ways of making it happen.

But now there’s no doubting it. Sylvain has been around plenty of omegas in heat and he knows what it looks like. What it feels like, making his blood pound and his focus drift and his breath come short.

Even so, it’s never felt like this. He feels like he’s about to shake out of his skin.

Of course, Sylvain thinks, wild, glancing down again at Felix’s flushed face, of course this would have to happen in the middle of a fucking military campaign.

Dimitri takes a step closer, gaze fixed on Felix in an all-consuming, chasm-deep way, and Sylvain tightens his arms around him. “Stay back,” he says. It comes out in a strange, unfamiliar voice ripped from low in his chest.

Dimitri’s visible eye is dilating, bright blue rapidly swallowed up by black. His lips curl back from his teeth in a clear warning. Sylvain doesn’t know if he’s even conscious of doing it or if it’s just instinct, advising Sylvain away from something he’s decided is his.

Aside from a few sparring matches that turned unduly competitive and ended with crying and broken practice swords or broken chairs or broken minor estates, it’s never been a problem before to have three alphas among the four of them who grew up together, but now—

Now Dimitri is looking at Felix like that, and if he doesn’t stop—never mind the prickling pressure at the back of his neck strongly and persistently advising that Sylvain submit to a stronger alpha—Sylvain’s very sure he’s going to have no choice but to tear his king’s throat out.

But before he has a chance to articulate this extremely reasonable warning aloud, magic hits him like a battering ram to the chest and he’s torn from Felix, thrown several feet away to land unceremoniously on his back in the mud.

All of the air is knocked clean out of his lungs, and he can only lie there and gasp up at the grey sky like a fish on land for several seconds before he manages to struggle up to a seated position, wild, furious at being separated from Felix.

The object of his fury turns out to be Annette. He hasn’t seen her since the battle started. One of her sleeves is ripped and her long velvet hems are horribly muddied but otherwise she doesn’t appear any worse for wear.

Sylvain had thought that Annette was his friend, but he was wrong, obviously, she’s his worst enemy, that’s very apparent now, because if she wasn’t she wouldn’t be standing here, between him and Felix.

Both her hands are held up with palms out, one in Sylvain’s direction and one in Dimitri’s. Sparks are ready at her fingertips, an obvious threat.

She shouts over one shoulder, “Ingrid, can you carry him?”

Ingrid, the only bonded alpha among the primary guard, already has her hands under Felix’s armpits and is hoisting him to his feet with little difficulty. “Come on, Felix,” Sylvain hears her say, no-nonsense as always but softer than usual. “Up we go.”

Felix makes a weak sound of protestation and reaches out towards Sylvain, twisting in her grip. He’s trying to pull himself away from Ingrid to get back to him. Sylvain feels possession flood through his veins, constricting tight around his heart.

“Let go of him,” he snarls, going up to his knees, and it doesn’t even sound like his voice. He’s struggling back to his feet when Ingrid shouts over one shoulder, “Stay down, Gautier, I mean it, I will let her hit you again!”

Sylvain stills. The order from another alpha hits harder, and more importantly, the further he gets from Felix the more he can feel rationality returning, straggling back from the fogged corners of his brain. It’s like being doused horribly in cold water.

He and Dimitri meet each other’s eyes, wearing—Sylvain would guess, he doesn’t have a mirror handy—expressions of matching horror.

Dimitri’s face is flushed as he pushes his messy blond hair back off his face. “I...sincerely apologize, Sylvain,” he says, polite tone somewhat stilted. He holds out a hand to Sylvain to help him up, every bit as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “Please excuse my behavior. I don’t know what came over me.”

It’s a poor lie, but Sylvain doesn’t call him on it. He’s too busy wildly trying to process the complete insanity of his own behavior to spare time for anyone else’s.

It’s not just that he’d challenged his friend or his king, it’s that he had challenged Dimitri. Dimitri, whom he had on more than one occasion seen separate a man’s head from his shoulders with only negligible exertion. On a purely practical level, it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever done, and there’s a lot to choose from.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Sylvain says, not meaning it, once he realizes both Annette and Dimitri are staring at him with visible concern and some wariness, as if they’re afraid he’s going to either start sprinting after Felix or go for them with the Lance of Ruin.

Sylvain summons a cheerful smile from the ether and takes Dimitri’s extended hand, allowing himself to be hauled to his feet. He lets go right away, brushing his hands off uselessly on his thighs.

It’s no good; Felix’s scent is all over him. It’s soaked into his skin. For all he knows it’s in his bloodstream.

He feels dazed, and angrier at Dimitri than he’d like for nothing at all, and still choking on the unbearable, all-consuming wanting that has very little to do with an alpha’s response to Felix’s heat and everything to do with him, Sylvain, the biggest idiot in all of Fódlan, and Felix.

Felix, who had squirmed himself into Sylvain’s arms without question. Who had looked up at him, trusting, almost like he was asking to be kissed. To be more than kissed.

Felix, who Sylvain’s been abjectly in love with since he was thirteen years old.

Sylvain knows everything that happened during those few minutes was only down to biology, for Felix. He’s forcing himself to remember it. It brings the sudden, biting pain of submerging cold-numbed fingers in warm water and flinching as feeling returns to them.

He could recite from memory the lectures from his father, his teachers; the warnings given to any alpha from a noble bloodline about how omegas might behave with them, often outside their own control, and how the responsibility was theirs not to allow lust to outbalance judgment.

To never take anything said or done during a heat at face value, or you’d be a fool. Twice a fool.

Sylvain’s scent had let Felix know he’d be safe, protected. Of course he had been drawn towards that. It could just as easily have been Dimitri who’d found him, Dimitri who’d gathered him up, Dimitri whose name he’d said like that.

He wonders, stomach twisting, if Dimitri had thought he smelled like his, too.

Sylvain’s arms feel empty. His heart feels hollowed out.

“You couldn’t help it,” he says, watching Ingrid walk Felix away. She’s at least half-supporting his weight, judging by her labored gait. “Instinct, and all that. No need to apologize.”

He laughs, short, and lies, “It was the same for me.”

*

When Mercedes emerges from Felix’s room, back at the abandoned Empire stronghold deep in Varley territory they’ve been occupying for the past week, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Dimitri all start talking at once.

“Please, keep your voices down,” Mercedes says over them, brow furrowed and delicate mouth turning down at the corners. She touches a finger to her lips. “I only just got him to sleep, and it took all the calming draughts I had.”

Sylvain catches a glimpse of Felix over her shoulder before she shuts the door, but it’s only of dark hair peeking out from a pile of blankets. Even so, just that is enough to make his heart skip a few painful beats.

It feels like there’s an invisible thread wrapped around it, the other end tied to Felix in that room. The closed door only barely makes a difference.

The feeling is intensified by the pull of the heat, but it’s not because of it. It’s nothing new. Sylvain had happily bound his own life to Felix’s years ago. He wonders if this would be less unbearable if he hadn’t.

It’s Dimitri’s rooms Felix is in, because the stronghold wasn’t intended for a royal company and so the King of Faerghus has been using the only private chamber. More importantly for Felix, it’s the only room with both a door and a lock.

The rest of them are out in the shared barracks, which are obviously out of the question for an omega in heat. It would cause chaos.

So he’s in Dimitri’s room, sleeping in Dimitri’s bed, and on a rational level Sylvain knows it’s necessary, knows it’s the only choice they have, but less rationally that doesn’t make him hate it any less.

If they were home, if this was happening like it should be, Felix would be in Sylvain’s room, Sylvain thinks darkly.

He immediately has to fight the urge to hit himself square in the face, hard, with his own gauntlet. What in Fódlan has gotten into him? If they were home, Felix would be in his own room. Five disoriented minutes on a battlefield and Sylvain has lost his damned mind.

“How could this happen?” Dimitri asks Mercedes again, into the chagrined silence following Mercedes’ admonition. His voice is hoarse, but steady. “How could we not have known he was an omega?” He glances over at Sylvain. “Did you—”

“No,” Sylvain says, short. It’s the closest he’s come to snapping at Dimitri in a long while. He doesn’t feel very steady at all. “I didn’t know.”

As if he would have been so unprepared today, if he’d known. As if he wouldn’t have tied Felix to a chair, locked him in a broom cupboard, fucking anything to keep him from coming into battle like this.

If he’d known, he could have trained for it. He could have planned and researched options years ago. He would have had magic ready, a spell, something to help him. He wouldn’t have been stuck staring helplessly down at a barely conscious Felix in the middle of a battlefield.

Worse than what had happened, Sylvain’s thoughts keep getting dragged back down the dark path of what might have. If Sylvain hadn’t been paying attention. If Felix had been found by the wrong person.

Even among the Kingdom army, he can’t vouch for everyone, and even those whom he trusts, outside the main company, he doesn’t trust anywhere near enough to let them around an omega in heat.

He thinks the horror of almost might choke him.

And all of that, thinking over the now-useless plans he might have made and every awful thing they’d somehow avoided, none of it can distract completely from the fresh wound left by the fact that Felix had never told him.

All those years, and he’d never said a word.

“But how has it never come up?” Dimitri presses, looking back to Mercedes and twisting the knife without realizing. “Even if he didn’t want us to know, surely he couldn’t have avoided being found out all this time. And he’s much too old to be going through his first heat.”

Mercedes sighs. Sorrow creases her face, and she glances back at the door. “You’re right. This wasn’t his first.”

Sylvain had figured as much. He just hadn’t known how. How, when he’s never paid as much attention to anything in his life as he does Felix, he could possibly have missed him being conspicuously absent for days or a week at a time.

“He’s been suppressing his heats since they started five years ago,” Annette answers both the spoken and unspoken questions before Mercedes can, emerging from the room and closing the door behind her.

She does it quickly, before Sylvain can crane his neck for another glimpse of Felix. Horribly, he does try anyway.

Annette looks exhausted. She’s carrying a muddied basin of water and a wrung-out cloth with red fading to pink staining the edges.

“The heats started right after the war did,” she says. “The first one, we were recruiting in Galatea. Sylvain and Dimitri were back in Fhirdiad, and Ingrid, we had split up for a few days. We told you Mercie had come down with a local strain of fever, remember?”

“I do,” Ingrid says, slowly. “You sent a messenger to tell me to stay away until you could be sure it wasn’t contagious.”

“And after that?” Dimitri asks. It’s helpful that he and Ingrid seem to have it covered, because Sylvain doesn’t think he has the wherewithal to put the words together to form a single question.

“After that, we were ready every time it happened,” Annette says, and then winces. “Until today, obviously. I’m sure you know there’s magic that can stop heats. He asked me to use it, and I did.”

She says all of this with a rote, practiced measure, as if she’s recited the words to herself over and over in preparation. As if she knew the revelation was going to be met with precisely the stunned-turned-judgmental silence it is.

Sylvain knows the magic she’s referring to; it’s fairly common for omegas in wartime to do what she’s describing, to avoid being vulnerable and unable to fight when they can’t be assured the luxury of being safe and unbothered for a number of days at a stretch.

But he’s never heard of anyone doing it for five years. Renewed worry constricts around his windpipe, a relentless iron vice. What if there are consequences? What if Felix is really sick because of it?

“I told him this was going to happen eventually, but he wouldn’t listen,” she says, rubbing at her eyes with her free hand. “I probably should have stopped helping, I know, but his heats always seem to come on at the worst times.”

Annette looks more tired than Sylvain has ever seen her, including all the times at school he’d caught her in the library studying past midnight and before dawn, eyes drooping and hands smudged with ink.

She sighs and shakes her head. “He kept saying we all needed him and he didn’t have the time to be out of commission for a week, and he was usually right. Now Mercie says we’ll be lucky if he’s in any fit state to fight in two.”

“Two weeks?” Ingrid blurts out, aghast. “We move for the bridge in half that time.” She looks to Dimitri, carefully contained panic in her green eyes. “We can’t risk staying here any longer, Dimitri. They’ll find us out any day now, if they haven’t already. But we obviously can’t take him along to a battle, not like this. What are we going to do?”

Dimitri says nothing. He looks like he’s lost in thought, or maybe just lost.

Something in his expression reminds Sylvain of when they were all younger, and the other three would look to him to solve every problem, to take care of anything they didn’t know how to. He wishes he could do that for them now. He doesn’t have the first clue where to start.

“Two weeks?” Sylvain echoes Ingrid. His voice comes out creaky, as if he hasn’t used it in a decade. “You’re sure?”

Annette’s an omega, but that’s not why he’s asking her. Sylvain’s asking because he trusts her implicitly, and particularly when it comes to Felix. She loves him as much as the friends who’d grown up with him, and that’s a tall order for several reasons.

Annette shakes her head, visibly frustrated but, he thinks, not at him for once. “I’m not sure at all,” she says. “That’s what I’m saying, there’s no way to know. If he was bonded it might be different, but as it is this is going to be much harder than a normal heat. We’ll just have to wait it out.”

If he was bonded. The throwaway statement sends a tremor through Sylvain. He has to grip for the wall next to him. He hadn’t even thought, but—if Felix is an omega, then...

Then there’s a very real likelihood that someday, he’ll be somebody’s mate. After the war is over, once they have time to think about things like that again, he could belong to someone else.

Everything in him rebels against the idea. Sylvain thinks he might be sick.

“Except we don’t have to wait it out,” Ingrid says. She’s got the determined look on her face that has always made Sylvain feel wary on instinct, ever since they were children.

“There’s an obvious solution,” she goes on. “Of course his heat is going to last longer if no one helps him through it, but there’s no reason to do that, not when we have options. Dimitri or Sylvain—”

Sylvain flinches without meaning to. He doesn’t think he can stand to have her say it aloud, suddenly; his name together with Dimitri’s like an interchangeable panacea for helping Felix through his heat. Like there would be no difference.

Even though she’s right, technically speaking, he can’t bear the thought of hearing it.

So he’s lucky that Annette, suddenly bristling, sets the basin down with a clang that makes Ingrid stop talking. “I am not going to stand here and let a bunch of alphas make this decision for him,” she snaps, looking suddenly very angry indeed. “All of you, get out of here.”

Mercedes touches her sleeve and murmurs something in her ear. At Annette’s nod, she tucks her short hair behind her ears and slips out of the loose circle they’re standing in, going off down the hallway.

“I’m trying to be practical,” Ingrid insists. “You just said it will be much harder for him without it. He’s suffering in there, we all know it. We’re his friends. I would do it myself if I wasn’t bonded.”

“Get out,” Annette says, loudly. “Now.”

Dimitri listens to the order first, respectful as he always is now that he’s his old self again. Ingrid follows closely after, focused expression suggesting she’s not nearly done with the subject.

Sylvain watches them leave in the opposite direction Mercedes had gone, Ingrid hurrying to catch up with Dimitri’s much longer strides.

I’m trying to be practical, she had said. Sylvain has to bite down on his lip to the point of bleeding to keep from laughing hysterically.

He tries to imagine touching Felix clinically, with a purely practical motivation. Tries to picture undressing him, feeling him beneath him, being inside him, without it mattering. Without it ruining him worse than he’s already ruined. Without it being the most important thing that’s ever happened to him, his entire sorry life.

It doesn’t work. He can’t hold onto the thread of it for even a second before it slips through his fingers.

Even if Ingrid were right and it was the best solution, Sylvain couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it and survive.

But he’s regrettably aware that if anyone else tries to, if anyone puts so much as a finger on Felix while he’s like this, he’s going to have to kill them. There’s no getting around it. It’s all a huge mess.

“By all of you I meant you too, Sylvain,” Annette says, interrupting his fevered thoughts. “Go away. Let him sleep.”

When he looks back at her he sees that her sharp expression has softened a bit, but her tone is still determined and her arms are folded over her chest.

“I can’t leave him like this,” Sylvain says, swallowing hard. Doesn’t she understand? He can’t just go. Not if Felix is hurting. “I promised—”

“To die with him,” she finishes for him. “We’ve all heard. You bring it up all the time. Lucky for you both, he’s not dying. He’s going to be fine.”

Sylvain chokes on a laugh. It hurts. “Funny, he didn’t seem fine.”

“He will be.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mercie says he will be, and she’s usually right.” She heaves a sigh, wiping the back of her arm across her sweaty forehead. “Come on,” she says, relenting still further. “You know Felix wouldn’t want you to see him like this.”

And Sylvain can argue against the first point, but not the second. Felix wouldn’t want him to. He’d be horrified to know that anyone at all had seen him like this, but especially the people who know him best.

In the back of his mind, Sylvain’s not so sure he wants to see Felix like this either. He’s not sure he has it in him to hear what he might say. What long-held longings Sylvain might not want to know about, or might not want confirmed.

Now that Sylvain’s not the only alpha near him, there’s no reason to think he’d be the one Felix would turn to for the type of help he needs. Especially not when Felix is going to be spending each day and night surrounded by Dimitri’s scent.

“Will you send for me if anything happens?” He rubs the back of his neck, trying to sound nonchalant and, he suspects, failing miserably. “If he, I don’t know, gets worse?”

“Of course,” Annette says. She says it like she’s annoyed with him but also like it really is a matter of course, like she wouldn’t think of doing anything different, and it helps.

Her red hair is escaping in wisps from her tightly bound braids, and there are shadows under her eyes. They’ve all been up for almost a full day and night. He thinks she’s probably about as worried about Felix as he is. That’s oddly comforting.

“I’ll come get you myself,” Mercedes speaks up, coming back down the hallway with fresh linens. She passes them over to Annette, kissing her on the corner of the mouth, and holds out a hand to Sylvain. “Will you walk with me now? He’ll sleep for a while longer, so there won’t be any change for some time. I promise.”

Sylvain nods, feeling at once overstimulated and oddly numb, and takes her hand, tucking it into his elbow.

They don’t go far. Mercedes leads him out to the stables, grey in the pale light before dawn. Sylvain sinks down onto a splintering old tack bench, looking down at his own hands. They’re striped light and dark in the shadows thrown by the grated window above.

There’s still dried blood on his palms and staining his knuckles from when he’d patted down Felix. He rubs absently at them with one thumb to flake the red off. Mercedes stays standing, and waits.

“Why would he lie about being an omega?” Sylvain asks finally, with a shaky laugh. He hates how obviously upset he sounds. He’s so much better at hiding things from everyone else than he is at hiding them from Mercedes.

He looks up and around at her, blinking. “All this time? Why wouldn’t he say something?”

“You know Felix better than most,” Mercedes says, bell-like voice gentle as always. She sits down beside him and rests a hand on his shoulder. “Is it so surprising?”

And for all that, given even a second’s thought, it isn’t. Not at all.

Felix is the most private person Sylvain’s ever met, and he remembers, now, the way Felix had gotten sneering and uncomfortable when omega heats were mentioned, back when they were all younger and sitting, bored and tittering, in class learning about categorizations.

“It’s embarrassing,” he had said, dismissive and curt.

They were on the inexorable downward slide into summer, and Felix had rolled up his sleeves against the heat. The classroom windows were all pushed open in hopes of catching a nonexistent breeze.

Sylvain had laughed, leaning back in his chair. “Oh, come on, Felix.”

Felix shrugged one shoulder, stiff. He didn’t look over at Sylvain. “I’d rather die than lose control like that.”

“It’s just biology,” Ashe had said, leaving off chewing on his pen. His eyes were round, and he looked surprised by Felix’s vehemence.

Felix had shaken his head, haughtier at sixteen than he ever was now. “It’s weak, and pathetic,” he’d said, folding his arms with an air of finality as the class was called to order. “I couldn’t stand it.”

Sylvain hadn’t been paying that much attention—he always paid attention to Felix, but he was less concerned with what he was saying and more interested in, for example, the faint blush dusting Felix’s cheeks, the sweep of his eyelashes when he looked down at his textbook—but he’d remembered Felix’s disdain.

It just hadn’t ended up mattering. Felix had never presented as an omega, like Annette and Ashe, or an alpha, like Ingrid and Sylvain and Dimitri, and so they had assumed—Sylvain had assumed—he was a beta like Mercedes and Dedue.

But he had presented, after all. He’d just never told them. He’d never told Sylvain.

The hurt of that is more minor than it might be in less serious circumstances, but it’s still there. Felix hadn’t trusted Sylvain with the truth, the way he trusts Mercedes or Annette. He almost never tells Sylvain anything. Sylvain’s still realizing the extent of it every day.

But Mercedes and Annette aren’t alphas and Sylvain is, and it all makes a horrible kind of sense because of course Felix wouldn’t trust him; why should he, when Sylvain had acted the way he had today?

It had barely taken anything—an encouraging gesture, the sound of his name in Felix’s mouth—and Sylvain had been ready to claim something that didn’t even belong to him. He hadn’t helped Felix when Felix had really needed it.

“Why did this happen now?” he asks, a real question rather than a hypothetical one, and Mercedes hums thoughtfully.

“It’s hard to say for sure. It does make sense for it to have happened during a time of high emotion like a battle, especially with his crest involved. It’s volatile, as you know.”

Sylvain snorts in acknowledgment. When Felix was only five and Sylvain was eight, Felix had flailed a hand during a particularly rowdy tickling match and punched him so hard he had a black eye for a week. Glenn had laughed so hard he’d cried.

Sylvain considers pointing out that Mercedes’ logic is sound except that battles aren’t a time of high emotion for Felix. Felix is always steadiest and least emotional when he’s fighting.

It doesn’t make much difference, though, in the end. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same.

He pushes to his feet, and Mercedes lets her hand fall back to her side. “Are you going to be okay?” she asks, soft and sweet, and Sylvain rubs at his prickling eyes, clearing his throat.

“Course I will,” he says, and throws one of his best smiles back down at her. “You know me, I always am. Let me know how he’s doing later, will you? I’m starving, I’m going to see about dinner.”

He can still feel her eyes on him as he strides out of the stables towards the kitchens.

*

“I need to switch beds with you,” Sylvain says to Ashe on the morning of the day after Felix’s heat starts.

He can’t sleep. He can smell Felix even down the hallway, and it’s driving him slowly insane. He’d fallen asleep thinking about Felix and dreamed of touching Felix and woken up hard and aching and empty. It’s unbearable.

He’d startled awake twice in the night—once in bed, reaching out for someone who wasn’t there; once actually on his feet, in the doorway of his own room, as if he’d been trying to sleepwalk down the hallway.

His body’s acting like he’s never been around an omega in his life, and Sylvain doesn’t know how to handle that except by distancing himself from the situation. Literally. He’ll sleep outside in the drained moat if he has to.

Ashe blinks at him. “You—I mean, that’s fine, I don’t mind, but why?”

“Can you just take my word for it?” Sylvain snaps, snaps at Ashe, who has never been anything but nice to him, whose fault this absolutely is not. Guilt sinks in immediately. He rubs his eyes. “Sorry. I’m—sorry. You’d just...be doing me a favor, that’s all.”

Ashe looks surprised, but not upset. “Okay,” he says, after giving Sylvain a considering look. “Let me get my things.”

The barracks are divided up into several four-bunk blocks; Sylvain had been in the one nearest the royal chambers, with Ingrid, Dedue, and Felix. He’s hoping that by switching to the one furthest away, near the armory, it will get him far enough from Felix to clear his head.

To his utmost relief, it works.

He takes Ashe’s former bunk beneath Linhardt’s, smelling nothing but the collective odor of three men in close quarters, and sleeps through the following night. He wakes up right where he’d fallen asleep, with no sign of any sleepwalking.

He still dreams about Felix, but then again, he usually does.

*

It only takes one more day and night before he caves. Completely. Embarrassingly.

“Please let me see him,” he begs Annette mid-morning, after he’s woken her from her self-imposed post outside Felix’s door.

Annette, now standing in front of the door to the room and making a valiant effort to block it from Sylvain’s line of sight for someone over a foot shorter than him, exhales through her nose. “Do you really think my answer is going to be different than it was an hour ago?”

“Please,” Sylvain says again. It’s the type of situation when he’d normally summon the fake pleading expression that has always gotten him nearly anything he wanted, but he doesn’t need to. It turns out the real thing comes to him pretty easily. “I just need to see him. I just need to know how he is.”

Annette gives him a steady look, and then holds up a finger. She twists the knob and cracks the door open, calls over one shoulder, “Felix? How are you?”

The only answer is a low, unintelligible sob.

The desperate pitch of it makes everything fly out of Sylvain’s head and he lurches forward, heedless of Annette, ready to physically move her if he has to. He needs to get to Felix, he needs to pet him, to hold him, to stop him from ever making that noise again.

He’s never heard Felix sound like that before, but it’s still somehow familiar. It calls to something in Sylvain, ties him up in knots.

He doesn’t even get a full step forward before he runs into what feels like a brick wall. “Ow,” he complains thickly, staggering back a step and holding his nose.

“Exactly,” Annette says, smug. She waves a hand and Sylvain sees a barrier spell glow momentarily golden as it dissolves. If he was paying attention, he might have sensed it before he’d found it with his face.

“This is worse than a normal heat,” Sylvain says, once he’s prodded at his nose gingerly and confirmed it doesn’t seem to be broken.

“Oh, is it?” Annette asks, with more condescension than should be able to fit in such a small body.

“Annette,” Sylvain says. He can hear the strain in his own voice, knows she can too.

She gives him a look that’s part sympathetic, part grievously annoyed. “I know you’re worried, Sylvain. I am too. Yes, it’s worse. He’s going through five years’ worth of heats all at once. I’m frankly surprised he even remembers his name.”

And, well, Sylvain feels that like a physical blow.

“Which is exactly why letting an alpha acting as weird as you are in there is the last thing I’m going to do,” she goes on, looking tired again. “How am I supposed to trust you with him when you can’t even trust yourself?”

“You don’t understand,” Sylvain starts, and then realizes he has no way to explain.

He won’t pretend he doesn’t want to fuck Felix. It would be a pointless lie. He’s wanted that for years, the ache of need is just deeper now. But that isn’t the worst of it. Not even close.

The worst is that Sylvain is sick with missing him.

Had he thought about it he would have realized, probably, that he spends every day with Felix. Or even if they spend it apart, he still sees him in the mornings, at night; he watches him across a campfire, sits with him side by side at a dining hall table, something.

He feels his absence like a physical ache, and it grows stronger each hour that passes. Sylvain wants to touch him, yes, but more than anything he just wants to see him. He wants to see him so badly.

Sylvain had known he was in love. He had known it was with everything he had. He maybe hadn’t realized how much that was.

“I understand perfectly,” Annette says. She looks almost pitying. Like maybe she does. “And that’s why I know I can’t let you in there.”

Sylvain swallows back just for a few minutes, chokes down the please, Annie, please.

“Will you sing to him for me?” he says instead.

Annette looks surprised.

Sylvain rubs one hand over the back of his neck, stuffs the other in his pocket to try and stop it from shaking. “He loves when you sing. It could...maybe it will calm him down. Help him sleep. I don’t know.”

“I’ll try it,” Annette says, expression awfully soft. “Is that all?”

Tell him I love him. Tell him I miss him being mean to me first thing in the mornings. Tell him he’s beautiful. Tell him I don’t need anything from him, anything at all, I would happily spend the rest of my life just being near him.

“Yeah,” Sylvain says, taking a step back and swallowing everything he can’t possibly say. “That’s all.”

*

Sylvain had almost told Felix, and that’s the funny not-so-funny part.

The morning of the battle, only three days ago, he had leaned down from his horse and caught Felix’s hand in the moments before they split to lead their separate battalions.

“What?” Felix had asked, annoyed, but he hadn’t immediately jerked his hand away, which meant he was in as good a mood as Sylvain had a chance of catching him. “Did you forget to sharpen your lance again?”

Sylvain just gazed down at him for a few seconds, even though he knew he had only scant time before Felix got fed up with the delay and he shouldn’t waste it. It was just that he never got tired of looking at Felix.

There was a chill in the air and both their breaths were coming in visible gusts. Felix’s cheeks were flushed from cold and his lips looked chapped.

“Why are you staring?” Felix demanded, going faintly red. “Did you fall off your horse?”

“Stay safe,” Sylvain said, unable to suppress his smile, sure the helpless fondness he felt must be all over his face. It always was. He’d given up on trying to hide it years ago, once he’d realized Felix wouldn’t notice anyway.

Felix did try to tug away then, huffing in annoyance. “That’s all? Thank you for wasting my time.”

Sylvain almost said it. Almost. Looking at how beautiful Felix was in the early morning light, sleep-deprived and irritated with him, he almost couldn’t help it.

Giving into an impulse he pulled him closer, up onto his toes. Sylvain shifted his grip from Felix’s sleeve to the nape of his neck, and leaned still further down off his horse, gripping the pommel with his other hand as an anchor, to press their foreheads together.

For a moment, they were breathing the same air, each exhale gusting warm on the other’s lips. Sylvain kept his eyes shut, because he knew if he let himself look at Felix that close up he’d be lost.

He almost said it a second time, then. The effort not to took everything he had, but he was used to that. He didn’t.

Instead he counted to four and uncurled his fingers from where they were brushing the soft fur of Felix’s cape, lingering against the silky tips of his hair.

He let go of Felix and did not kiss him and straightened back up on his horse and didn’t kiss him, and said only, “Come back to me, okay?”

Felix had stared up at him with surprised, round eyes for one, two, three seconds. Then he blinked and made a derisive sound and mumbled, “I always have, haven’t I? Ridiculous.”

He’d stalked away up the rain-muddied hillside without a backwards glance. As always, Sylvain watched him go long after he couldn’t see him anymore.

*

On the fourth day, Dimitri calls a council meeting.

Sylvain’s rummaging through his belongings, knelt shirtless on the stone floor going through his bags with some annoyance when the summons comes. His patience has been increasingly frayed the past few days, his temper much too short.

It’s obvious why, but fortunately so far no one has dared bring it up to his face.

“Has anyone seen my green shirt?” Sylvain asks over one shoulder to Linhardt and Caspar, both of whom are in the room. Caspar is sharpening arrowheads and Linhardt is reading, or else he’s sleeping, Sylvain isn’t paying much attention because he’s absorbed with his missing shirt.

They had packed light for this campaign, but he knows he’d brought the green shirt, the one with the tear in the left sleeve that Ingrid had sloppily repaired with yellow thread while they were camped out in the mountains last winter. He’d worn it only last week. Maybe he’d somehow missed it when he was hastily packing to move rooms, and it’s still back down the hall?

“Haven’t seen it,” Caspar says with a shrug, and when Sylvain glances back he sees Linhardt shaking his head, looking drowsy and like he only half-heard the question.

Before he can get up to go and ask Ashe about it, Dimitri raps once on the open doorway, in a show of his typical impeccably awful timing. “Sylvain. We need you.”

Sylvain doesn’t want to talk to Dimitri right now, or in fact look at him or be anywhere near him, but he can’t exactly say no, so he gives up on the shirt and grabs the one he’d worn yesterday off the edge of his bed. He shrugs it on, buttoning it up as he follows Dimitri down the hall.

“You can’t be serious,” Sylvain says, once he’s been ushered into the cramped planning room with Dimitri, Ingrid, Dedue, and Annette, and realizes belatedly what the topic of the gathering is going to be.

He crosses his arms and stares across the map-strewn table at Dimitri. “You called a council meeting about Felix?”

“It’s not about Felix,” Dimitri says, patient. “But we do need to plan for our attack on Myrrdin. We’re out a general, and it’s fairly obvious from what Annette has told me that he won’t be in any fit state to fight tomorrow, so we need to decide both who will take charge of the second battalion in his stead and who will stay here with him.”

Me. I will. Don’t make me leave him. But Sylvain can’t say it, because he’s a general too. He doesn’t have the option of staying behind.

Dimitri looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Sylvain wonders if he’s been as distracted by Felix as he has, and then immediately stops thinking about that at all costs.

“I’ll stay with him,” Annette says at once, but Dimitri shakes his head. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for him the past few days, but we need you with us, Annette. You’re the best mage we have.”

“We need everyone,” Ingrid interjects shortly. She’s standing to Dimitri’s left, in half armor, folded arms bare and hair unbound. “That’s what he’s not saying.”

“Ingrid,” Dimitri says in a tone of clear warning.

She throws up her hands. “What? This is lunacy! You know very well we can’t afford to leave anyone behind. This company was hand-picked. You expect us to fight without Felix and someone else in this room on top of that?”

It has the distinct intonation of something she’s repeated many times, and from the way Dimitri stiffens, Sylvain guesses he’s not wrong.

“I am not going to make anyone do anything they don’t want or haven’t agreed to,” Dimitri says, words clipped. “As we have discussed at length, Ingrid.”

“We’re putting him in danger by doing nothing,” Ingrid says. “Not just him, either. All of us are at risk the longer this goes on.”

It’s unsettling to hear her argue with Dimitri; not that Ingrid hasn’t been stubborn since they were small, but she’s always been more aware of the adulthood-drawn line between king and friend than Sylvain or Felix.

Now, though, she’s looking at her king and friend like she wants to strangle him with her bare hands. “I have no idea why you’re being so impossible about this when he’s made it clear who he wants,” she says. “The solution is right there and you’re insisting on doing nothing, it’s maddening!”

Syvlain, leaning against the open window, almost falls out of it.

He’s made it clear who he wants. He looks from Ingrid’s determinedly set mouth to Dimitri’s clenched jaw, and his heart sinks right down to his toes. He feels sicker than ever.

It’s not like it’s a surprise, after all. He’s known since this started what it might mean, what the eventual end was likely going to be.

He wonders when Ingrid had gone by Felix’s room and heard him ask for Dimitri, or whether Annette had gone to Dimitri herself and Dimitri had made the foolish mistake of giving Ingrid any information at all and expecting her not to beat him to death with it.

“I will not make that choice for him,” Dimitri says rigidly. He looks truly angry. That’s something Sylvain hasn’t seen in a while, either. “And you will not ask me to again.”

“Someone has to,” Ingrid says, without yielding a fraction. “You think you’re helping him by being noble? I don’t like this either, but apparently I’m the only one willing to look at the bigger picture!”

Ingrid is just like Felix in many ways Sylvain would never tell them both. It’s always been harder for her to talk about some things than others. She’s never been good at saying when she’s scared for her friends, for example, because she’ll just do something about it instead.

She can’t do anything now, and it’s why she’s being so belligerent, why she won’t let it go. Why she’s talking about the greater good when it’s Felix she’s worried about. Sylvain understands, but it’s still making him feel like he’s going to break apart.

“This argument isn’t helping anything, and we should not be having it here,” Dimitri says in a tone that brooks no contradiction.

“For the Goddess’ sake—”

“For the Goddess’ sake will you just go to him,” Sylvain interrupts loudly, pushing off the wall.

They both shut up and turn to look at him wearing matching expressions of surprise. Sylvain gestures broadly in Dimitri’s direction. “He wants you! This isn’t some moral quandary! Ingrid’s right, we all know what the solution is. He’s hurting, and every minute that you wait the more it hurts him! I don’t know how you can stand it. I certainly couldn’t.”

Ingrid is just staring at him. Sylvain thinks at the very least she could be grateful for his help. “Sylvain,” Dimitri starts, shaking his head, reaching out to him like he might to a skittish horse. “That’s not—”

He can’t stand it, he can’t. If he’s forced to endure this conversation one second more he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

“You all carry on without me,” Sylvain says with a forced smile. “I need some air.”

Without waiting to hear another word from either Dimitri or Ingrid, he turns on his heel and walks out.

*

He winds up out in the stables again, because being around the horses is always comforting. It has been since he was much younger, and needed refuge for different reasons.

He ducks into his own horse’s stall and pulls an iron-toothed comb carefully through her mane until it gleams.

She snuffles at his hair at first, investigating to see if he’s brought her a treat, then huffs in resignation when she ascertains he hasn’t and surrenders herself to be groomed.

Sylvain means for the distance and quiet to be a distraction. But the harder he tries not to think about Felix and Dimitri, the worse it is.

It’s hard to say if Dimitri will listen to him, when he wouldn’t to Ingrid. But maybe he will. He has in the past, after all.

Maybe he’ll go to Felix, like Sylvain told him to. Wake Felix up, climb into bed with him, pull his clothes off and kiss him all over, everywhere he’ll beg to be kissed.

Even though it feels like dying, Sylvain can’t stop imagining what Felix will sound like. How he’ll behave, his first time with an alpha—with anyone, if Sylvain’s hunch is right, and they almost always are when it comes to Felix.

It’s unhelpful that Sylvain has been with omegas before. It makes it far too easy to imagine Felix begging. Gasping Dimitri’s name. Sylvain wonders whether Dimitri will just go ahead and mark him, whether Felix will ask him to.

He wonders whether the next time he sees Felix, he won’t be his anymore.

Sylvain rests his forehead against his horse’s warm neck and closes his eyes. She nickers softly at him.

Annette finds him some time later, Sylvain’s not sure how long.

“I need you to come with me,” she says with no preamble from the open stall doorway.

“This isn’t the best time, Annette,” he says, smoothing a hand down the horse’s flank.

“I got that. I need you to come with me anyway.”

“Look, they don’t need me for the meeting. Dedue should switch to the second battalion, obviously, and then Dimitri can take over the first. It’s not ideal, but it’ll work. I’m not too interested in how the other conversation worked out, so as long as you all don’t leave without me tomorrow—”

“Sylvain,” Annette says loudly. “Shut up for once in your life and listen to me, will you?”

He raises his eyebrows at her, but says nothing. She takes a deep breath, and goes on, “I think I know why you lost it in there. And you should know, it isn’t Dimitri Felix is asking for.”

“Oh no?” Sylvain resumes brushing, staring only at the comb as it moves without snags through the sleek chestnut mane. He manages not to let the shock he feels show. Not Dimitri? Ingrid’s the only other alpha in the immediate company, and it’s not as if Felix spends much time with the foot soldiers. “Then who?”

Annette says nothing, and when he looks back over one shoulder at her she’s staring at him, looking caught between pity and exasperation. “Who? Oh for the—you, you absolute unbelievable moron,” she snaps, throwing her hands up. “He’s asking for you.”

Sylvain fumbles the comb. “I. What?”

Annette huffs her bangs out of her face. “The first day he was mostly sleeping, and he didn’t say much the second day—I think he was being stubborn—but then halfway through yesterday, he started saying your name.” She pulls a dismal face. “And did not stop, by the way, which was just. Unlivable. I wanted to cut my ears off. I had to give him one of your shirts to calm him down.”

“One of my shirts?” Sylvain manages to force out around his rapidly constricting airway. The missing green one now makes sense, or it would if it wasn’t so impossible. He wonders if Annette thinks this is a funny joke. “But I thought—I mean, I assumed he would want--”

“Of course you did, because you are so stupid,” Annette says.

“If that’s true,” Sylvain starts. It feels like all the air has been punched out of his lungs. Forming words at all is difficult. “If it’s true,” he says again, with effort, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

She folds her arms and meets his eyes. Hers are clear, and her gaze is steady. “Look, I remember heats before being bonded, okay? It’s not like you’re always feeling that picky. I might have asked for you, in a pinch.”

“I’m flattered,” Sylvain says, more or less automatically.

“Don’t be,” she says. “My point is, wanting someone doesn’t mean you want them. And it was clear that Felix hadn’t talked to anyone about it in advance; what his preference would be if this were to happen, I mean, because it’s Felix and why would he.”

She worries at her bottom lip. “I should’ve told you sooner, I see that now. But I didn’t because I didn't want anyone to do something they were going to regret later, just because the heat made it seem like a good idea at the time.”

“And you don’t think that’s what this is?”

Instead of answering, Annette says, “During his first heat, he asked for Dimitri.”

Sylvain doesn’t quite wince, but it’s close. “What a fun fact, thank you Annette.”

She thumps him hard on the chest. “Listen to me, you idiot! He was asking for Dimitri back then. He’s in Dimitri’s room now, in Dimitri’s bed, and he’s not asking for him. He is only asking for you, goddess knows why, and he will not stop.”

Sylvain takes a moment to process this. He feels like he’s been clubbed. “Only me?”

“Only you,” Annette confirms. “Your scent made him calm. He already thinks of you as his mate, whether or not he knows it. And right now he is miserable, and you are miserable, and I would like you to go fix it, for yours and all of our sakes.”

“I—” Sylvain starts, and falters, zeroing in on the most immediately important information. “I can see him?”

“You can see him,” Annette confirms, weary.

“I have to go,” Sylvain says, and Annette rolls her eyes and says, “It took you long enough.”

*

Mercedes is sitting outside Felix’s room when Sylvain approaches, sewing small, delicate flowers onto a torn sleeve. She must have been assigned to keep watch in Annette’s place.

“Hello, Sylvain,” she says cheerfully, setting her embroidery aside. She doesn’t look at all surprised to see him. It’s confirmed when she stands up, brushes off her skirts, and produces a key from her skirt pocket to hand over. “I’m assuming you won’t let anyone else in?”

“I’ll die first,” Sylvain says, with complete honesty.

When he opens the door, Felix’s scent is so strong it almost bowls him over, which is not a promising start.

Sylvain has told himself he’s going to keep it together. He’s not going to be a mindless animal about this. He’s going to talk to Felix, to ascertain for sure whether what Annette is saying is true. Because if it isn’t...if it isn’t, no matter how much he wants Felix, he can’t take that choice from him.

It’s not that he thinks Annette would lie to him. It’s just a lot to take in, the suggestion that everything you’ve ever wanted might already be yours.

Getting slammed in the face with omega pheromones is absolutely not helping with the plan, as it stands. It is abruptly threatening to replace the plan with the other one. The one where he gets to be a mindless animal.

He locks the door and throws the bolt behind him as a precaution, trying to stop his hands from shaking.

The windows are closed and there’s a fire burning high in the small hearth. It’s so warm Sylvain can already feel himself overheating, even stripped down to shirtsleeves and trousers as he is.

The bed is a wreck of blankets. The pillows have been thrown off onto the ground nearby. Felix is curled up in the sheets in the middle of the bed, asleep.

Sylvain feels the sight of him hit low in the gut. His beauty is a knife to the throat, like always. He’s never been able to get used to it, but usually seeing Felix every day helps to dull the edge.

Felix is wearing Sylvain’s missing green shirt, and it’s visibly too big on him even with the sleeves pushed up haphazardly to the elbows the way they are now.

One bare knee is poking out from the sheets, which is enough to indicate that he’s likely not wearing anything else. Heat pools in Sylvain’s stomach as he approaches the bed.

Felix’s hair is tied back more messily than usual, and the firelight gleams on his skin. It almost hurts to look at him, but Sylvain doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to stop.

“Hey, Felix,” he says softly, going down on one knee next to the small bed and reaching out to pet his sweaty hair away from his face, tracing fingertips up over his browbone and down the line of his jaw. “I’m here.”

“Sylvain,” Felix says. Sylvain can hear the relief in it, the exhaustion. That hurts. His eyes blink open. They’re red around the edges. He’s been crying. That hurts worse. “Where have you been?”

The question itself is bossy and rude, just like he’d expect from Felix, but Felix says it differently than he would usually. He says it like it matters. Like he’s hurt, too.

As Sylvain watches, heart in his mouth, new tears fill Felix’s eyes. “I kept asking for you,” he mumbles. He turns his head to one side, twisting away from Sylvain. “You didn’t come. I needed you and you wouldn’t come.”

“I didn’t know,” Sylvain whispers, looking at the protective hunch of his shoulders. He feels gutted. “You have to believe me, baby, I didn’t know. I thought you—I didn’t think I was the one you wanted.”

“You’re so stupid,” Felix accuses, voice muffled in the bedclothes.

“Please look at me,” Sylvain says, gentle, and hears Felix breathe out raggedly. He rolls back over to look at him, eyes wet and angry. Tears have rolled down his nose, drying on his cheeks and the curve of his mouth.

Sylvain touches his damp bottom lip with one finger, transfixed. He doesn't even think about what he’s doing until Felix moans and parts his lips further, trying to suck on it.

Sylvain feels a wrench of agony in his chest as he pulls back. “I just came to see how you are,” he says unconvincingly, forces the words out, recalling his abandoned script.

Felix sits up and Sylvain sits back on his heels. Sylvain’s shirt is slipping off Felix’s bare shoulder, and there’s a sheen of sweat on the slope of his collarbone, in the hollow of his throat.

Sylvain wants to put his mouth there. He wants to lie Felix back against the sheets and fuck him in Sylvain’s own shirt until he’s incoherent.

Felix’s breath hitches, eyes dark, and Sylvain realizes he’s said it out loud. “Please,” Felix says. The line of his throat moves as he swallows. Sylvain wonders what sound he’d make if he sunk his teeth into the unmarked skin there.

Looking at Felix with his tear-starred eyelashes, lips bitten, Sylvain tries very, very hard to remember what his original plan was. Talking to Felix. Not manhandling Felix. Yes.

“I can’t,” he says, voice cracking. “I can’t, sweetheart, not like this, I’m sorry.”

Felix starts crying again. He lies back down in the rumpled sheets. “Why? Why?”

It takes Sylvain a moment to register that he’s moving his hips against the mattress, now, trying to get some friction, and it’s shameless and desperate and one of the hottest things Sylvain has ever seen. He’s rendered speechless by it.

It takes everything in him not to cover Felix’s body with his, pin him down, lace their fingers together, grind his hips against Felix’s until he shudders and shudders and comes all over himself.

He feels frozen in place with wanting, with the strain not to give in to it.

“I hate this,” Felix says, choked off. It interrupts Sylvain’s reverie, draws his attention back. Felix’s eyes are squeezed shut, and there’s a flush high in his cheeks, staining his throat. He’s embarrassed, Sylvain realizes, but he can’t stop what he’s doing even though he knows Sylvain is watching.

“I hate it so much,” Felix goes on. He curls a fist in the sheets. “I want it to be over. I can’t, ah, I can’t stand being like this.”

You’re beautiful like this, Sylvain thinks, dazed. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

He wants to move closer, to touch Felix in some way, any way, but once he starts he won’t be able to stop so he just stays there, knelt by the bedside. “I’m sorry,” he says again, because he is, because it isn’t fair.

He reaches out and pets Felix’s hair again, watches him arch into the touch, watches his hips stutter in the second Sylvain first puts a hand on him. It’s mesmerizing.

“It’s even worse than normal,” Felix goes on, breathing growing more and more labored as he ruts against the bed. Sylvain is so hard he can’t be sure there’s blood remaining in any other part of his body. He can’t tear his eyes away.

Sylvain hears himself ask, feeling very far away, “What’s worse?”

“You,” Felix says. He says it like a curse. He opens his eyes, half-lidded like a cat’s, and glares at Sylvain. “Everything about you. Everything was fine until you said...until you almost…”

“What?” Sylvain coaxes. He unsticks his tongue from the bone-dry roof of his mouth. He runs his fingers through Felix’s hair again, loosening the ineffective tie and letting his fingernails scrape at the nape of Felix’s neck. “What did I say? What did I do?”

Felix shudders all over, bowing his head. “You touched me.”

Sylvain thinks he might smile. “I do that all the time.”

“Not like that,” Felix gasps, jerking his hips against the bed and whining low in his throat. “Not, not like that. You looked at me like, ah, I thought you were going to—”

“To what?” Sylvain can barely breathe.

“To kiss me,” Felix mumbles, cheeks stained even redder from exertion or embarrassment or both.

“I was,” Sylvain whispers. He can’t even think to lie. “I was.”

“And now you won’t,” Felix accuses. He seems to decide the friction isn’t enough on its own because he reaches down underneath himself to wrap a hand around his cock with a stifled gasp of relief, and that’s not fair at all, Sylvain can’t see, he needs to see.

I can’t, Sylvain thinks to say again, to correct Felix, the only words he knows anymore, the ones he’s clinging to so hard they’ve lost all meaning. But they get caught in his throat. He doesn’t remember why he can’t.

Felix is being louder now, making bitten off desperate sounds that remind him of the one he’d made when Annette had refused to let Sylvain in to see him.

Was he doing this then? Was he stroking himself off, imagining Sylvain? Were his fingers curled inside himself, trying to replicate what he knew he really needed?

Between that mental picture and the heat of the fire, Sylvain really might faint.

“It’s not enough,” Felix whines, twisting so that he’s looking at Sylvain, panting. His hair is sticking to his forehead, and he looks more beautiful than he ever has, and not being able to touch him feels like being torn apart. “It’s not—I need you, I need you, please, this is your fault, the least you could do is fix it.”

It’s too much. Sylvain will die.

“Stop,” he says, hoarse, putting pressure on the back of Felix’s neck. He hears his own voice coming as if from far away. “Wait. Wait for me.”

He pushes to his feet and shoves off his boots and climbs onto the bed on hands and knees, and Felix says, voice coming out half a sob, “Yes, Sylvain, goddess, fucking finally.”

Sylvain gets hands on his hips and maneuvers him over onto his back and Felix makes a noise of such pure, abject relief at being so handled that Sylvain can’t even think of doubting his choice. Felix only lies still for a moment before he’s pulling at Sylvain, demanding, trying to rip his shirt off over his head.

Sylvain helps him get the shirt off then pushes Felix’s legs apart to kneel in between them. He really wants to spend time kissing his way up each slender calf, because he’s been obsessed with Felix’s legs since he was nineteen, but he suspects Felix really might snap and kill him if he tries.

So instead his first order of business is to kiss Felix on the mouth. He means it to be sweet, an appropriate first kiss, but it spins out of his control, turns devouring.

He rests all his weight on his elbows so that he can take Felix’s face in both hands. He kisses him for everything he’s worth, and more than, because Felix has always been worth more than him, always been the most precious thing he had.

Sylvain has an appreciation for kissing, in general. He thinks he could kiss Felix for hours, for days, and never get tired of it.

Felix just reacts so beautifully. He’s not used to being kissed, and he’s so hungry for kisses, for touch. He’s so sensitive he’s inches from crying again, Sylvain knows it, he can taste the salt on his lips when he runs his tongue over the swollen bottom one.

Felix clutches at him, one hand curled around Sylvain’s wrist in encouragement and the other trying to undo the fastenings of his trousers.

“Greedy,” Sylvain says, nudging Felix’s nose with his own and going in for another kiss. He catches Felix’s roaming hand, pinning it back to the bed. “You didn’t ask first.”

Felix moans plaintively into his mouth. He’s gone completely loose-limbed and pliant beneath him. He’s still in Sylvain’s shirt and nothing else and Sylvain likes that, he likes it so much. He would love to see Felix in nothing at all but he’s too obsessed with how the shirt looks on him to take it off.

He levers himself up and sits back on his haunches, finding the hem, and begins to undo the buttons from the bottom up. He doesn’t peel it off Felix’s shoulders when he’s done, only pushes it up around his hips so that he’s bare from the waist down. Felix arches up into his hands, making small whimpering noises.

He’s hard and leaking, and it looks almost painful. It probably is, if he’s been like this for as long as it seems like he has.

Sylvain fits his thumbs into the hollows of Felix’s hips, presses them down against the sheets and lowers his mouth to Felix’s flushed cock.

Felix tremors like he’s been shocked when Sylvain licks the head experimentally. “Please, please,” he pants, squirming. “It’s not—I need more.”

Felix may need more, but Sylvain needs everything. He licks Felix again, savoring, and then takes pity on him and takes him all the way down in one go. Felix says, “Sylvain,” like it’s been punched out of him, clutches at Sylvain’s hair with one hand and the messy sheets with the other.

Sylvain searches between his legs and is rewarded when his fingers sink into the hot, wet slickness waiting there. He pulls off and presses a kiss to Felix’s abdomen, looking up at him through his lashes. “Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, awed. “You’re soaking.”

Felix blushes beautifully. “Shut up,” he gasps, and then Sylvain puts his mouth back on him and twists his fingers experimentally inside him and Felix is the one to shut up. He makes a whining sound and spreads his legs wider to allow better access, tossing his head to one side with his teeth sunk deep into his bottom lip.

Sylvain knows because he’s watching, avid, even though the angle is killing his neck. He wants to memorize every single moment of this.

He knows he’s great at sucking dick. Even if he didn’t have Felix’s hitching gasps and stifled curses to tell him so, he knows. He makes it as good as he knows how, being sloppy about it, spit all over his chin, and it doesn’t take long at all before Felix is shoving his hips up towards Sylvain’s face and pushing down onto his fingers at the same time, before he’s gasping, “Fuck, fucking, yes,” and then choking out again, “Sylvain!”

Sylvain recognizes a warning when he hears it, but he doesn’t pull off. He continues licking and sucking and devouring every inch of Felix until he cries out and arches off the bed like a bowstring and comes down Sylvain’s throat, fingers fisted tight in Sylvain’s hair.

“Look at you,” Sylvain says, approving, voice ruined. He slides his fingers out of him and wipes them off on the sheets.

Felix is a mess, sweaty, his stomach covered in his own come. He’s lying on his side, breathing hard, looking halfway to wrecked. He’s still hard, cock dribbling come onto his taut stomach.

Sylvain pauses to shimmy out of his trousers—Felix makes a plaintive sound at being left alone and he rips the laces irreparably—then goes up on his knees again and maneuvers him, loose-limbed and wet-eyed from overstimulation, over onto his stomach.

“Okay?” he asks, pressing a kiss to Felix’s shoulder, and Felix just nods.

Sylvain pushes into him easily, pulling another desperate moan from Felix, and drapes himself flush up against his back, hand delving to splay over his abdomen. He has to stay like that for a long moment, trying to ground himself, to keep from coming in ten seconds flat.

Then Felix says in a strangled voice, “Will you move?” and Sylvain laughs, low, and rocks forward into him, pulling him back into Sylvain’s slow thrusts.

“Oh, goddess,” Felix groans in a voice pulled from deep inside of him. He tries to keep himself up on shaking arms, letting his head drop forward. “Harder.”

And it’s not that Sylvain doesn’t want to. Not that he hasn’t thought about it more times than he’d care to admit, shoving Felix up against a stable wall or backing him into a dark tapestried corner and taking him as hard and rough as he’s ever wanted to, until Felix is begging.

But now Felix is hot and wet around him and Sylvain is halfway to seeing stars already, and it isn’t hard and ruthless he wants.

“I can’t be rough with you, baby,” Sylvain says in his ear. He gasps low as he thrusts in again, shifting his fingers over Felix’s stomach until he can feel the movement from both ends. “It’s been too long, I’ve wanted you too long, I have to be slow.”

“Fuck, Sylvain, please,” Felix moans, each word breaking apart into multiple syllables as Sylvain moves steadily and inexorably inside him. Sylvain doesn’t alter his pace even slightly.

He laces his fingers through Felix’s, presses both their palms back down to the sheets. He trails kisses over his shoulders, up the back of his neck, along his jaw.

“I can feel you everywhere, sweetheart,” he says against his skin, and Felix trembles even harder.

“I hate you,” Felix says fervently. His arms buckle and he would slump forward, except that Sylvain supports his weight, pressing a supporting hand over his throat and clavicle and pulling him back against him. Felix lets his head tip back against Sylvain’s shoulder. “I hate you, can’t you see that I’m, ah, I’m dying.”

“I know, I know you are,” Sylvain says, soft. He presses a kiss to the side of his throat. “But you’re being so good for me, you’re taking it so good.”

He leans back on his knees, pulling Felix up with him, legs splayed on either side of Sylvain’s, so that he can fist Felix’s cock at the same lazy, unhurried pace.

Felix comes for a second time with a bitten off cry, slumps back against Sylvain.

“You’re perfect,” Sylvain murmurs, pulling out of Felix, still hard, spilling him carefully out of his lap and stroking a hand down his sweaty back. “You’re so beautiful when you come for me, do you know that?”

He rolls Felix over onto his back again to watch him blink dazedly up at the ceiling, chest heaving from exertion. His eyes are dark and big and out of it, full of the firelight.

“I can’t,” Felix says, words a little bit slurred, but he opens his legs for Sylvain again all the same when he eases them apart, makes a soft, wounded sound when Sylvain slides back into him. He wraps his arms around Sylvain’s shoulders. He’s still shaking faintly from his last orgasm.

“Are you okay?” Sylvain whispers, holding very still. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” Felix says, eyes flickering shut. He lingers on the word. “Don’t stop.”

He guides Sylvain in with his thighs and knees and then lets his head fall back against the sheets as Sylvain slides all the way into him, to the hilt, until there’s no space at all between them.

“I’m so deep in you,” Sylvain murmurs, and Felix’s cheeks flare. He twists his head to one side, but he doesn’t even try to stifle all the beautiful, needy sounds he’s making this time, just grips Sylvain’s shoulders and clings to him as Sylvain fucks into him, steady and inexorable.

“No one else has seen you like this, have they?” Sylvain asks. He’s rambling, he’s barely even aware of what he’s saying at this point, but can’t stop the words from spilling out. “Just me. You’re mine, you were made for me, weren’t you?”

By way of answer, Felix gasps out, “Mark me.”

Sylvain’s so startled he actually stops moving, and Felix swears at him, clawing at his back. Sylvain fucks into him again, but he’s shaking his head. “Not like this,” he says with what he deems a considerable amount of self control. Felix doesn’t know what he’s asking, they’ve never even talked about it, it’s not something he should decide like this—

“I thought I was yours,” Felix says, with a surprising amount of rudeness for someone who’s just come twice. Or at least, it would be surprising if it was anyone but Felix.

“You are,” Sylvain says. “But I still can’t.”

“Fine, don’t,” Felix says, and moans into the latest thrust. “Leave me alone and helpless for anyone to fuck me, I don’t care, I’ll enjoy it. I’ll beg them to, just like this, and it’ll serve you right.”

And that, obviously, works exactly the way Felix means it to. Sylvain growls low in his throat and nudges Felix’s chin to the side, fits his mouth to the juncture between Felix’s throat and shoulder before he’s even aware of doing it. He hesitates then, but Felix gasps, “Fucking do it,” and Sylvain bites down, hard.

He’s so close already, between having Felix’s cock in his mouth and being inside him. Felix begging him to mark him is too much, Sylvain feels he’s put up a good show but he can’t last through that.

He’s going to pull back and out of him but Felix reaches up, nails digging into his side to keep him there. “Don’t you, ah, don’t you fucking dare,” he spits out. “If you stop I’ll kill you.”

“I’m going to,” Sylvain starts, and Felix says, eyes half-lidded, “I know, Mercedes gave me something, it’ll be fine, please, I want you to.”

When Sylvain finally comes inside him, Felix whimpers with relief and reaches back to hold him there, shuddering through the aftershocks, feeling Sylvain swell inside him.

He’s half-hard again now and Sylvain wraps a hand around him, sliding up his length with slow, leisurely strokes until Felix whines and squirms and comes over his fingers.

Sylvain doesn’t try to dislodge either of them, just wraps his arms tight around Felix and buries his face in the back of Felix’s neck and, exhausted, goes almost instantly to sleep.

*

He wakes up with his arms empty.

When he rolls over he finds that Felix is sitting cross-legged in the bed next to him, still in Sylvain’s shirt, which he’s buttoned up again.

He’s watching Sylvain with an oddly inscrutable expression, given that Felix’s face is usually an open book. His eyes are clear.

“Heat broke?” Sylvain asks sleepily, lifting one eyebrow. Felix says, terse, “What gave it away?”

The relief at hearing Felix be so Felix is overwhelming. Sylvain chuckles into his pillow.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asks, because he feels he should get it out of the way.

“No,” Felix says, after a moment’s pause.

“Good,” Sylvain says, and yawns. “I’m not sure I can stand. Or move, for that matter. Can you come back down here?”

Felix looks uncertain, somehow, like after all that cuddling is the thing that’s a bridge too far. But he lies back down next to Sylvain, somewhat awkward, and Sylvain wraps his arms around him and pulls him back to his chest.

“Idiot,” Felix mutters, but Sylvain can feel him squirm closer. He fits himself up against Sylvain’s side, presses cold bare feet to Sylvain’s leg. Sylvain traces lazy fingertips up over his spine, down along his arm. “Are you okay?” he asks, after a few minutes of quiet.

“Mm,” Felix says, which while not terribly illuminating seems to be affirmative.

He doesn’t volunteer any further insight as to how he’s feeling after being fucked senseless by his second-oldest friend, but he is letting Sylvain snuggle him within an inch of his life without even complaining, so Sylvain, whose heart is threatening to burst out of his chest with happiness, thinks he can’t be doing too badly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sylvain asks, quiet. “About you?”

Felix tenses up. “You didn’t have to,” Sylvain says hastily. He shifts to sit up against the headboard, and after a moment Felix follows, just as Sylvain had hoped he would, curling back into his arms. Sylvain pulls the sheets up over them both, rearranging their legs to fit together. “It’s okay. I just...why didn’t you?”

Felix is quiet for a long time. “I just didn’t want to talk about it,” he says stiffly. “I wouldn’t have told Annette or Mercedes either, they were just, there, and I couldn’t very well hide it from them.”

It’s a simple answer, but maybe it really is that simple. It’s not hard to imagine Felix thinking he could hide being an omega from everyone in the world without any help at all.

“Annette said,” Sylvain starts, reminded at the mention of her name, and then chickens out and doesn’t finish the sentence.

Felix elbows him. “What?”

“She said you didn’t ask for Dimitri, this time.”

Felix doesn’t bolt, but Sylvain can feel the tremor as the impulse runs through him. “Okay,” he says, sharp. He does not like this topic, that’s very clear. “And?”

“And,” Sylvain murmurs, patient, running his thumb over the soft skin behind Felix’s ear, “Why is that?”

“I’m assuming you’re not going to accept, I didn’t want him to fuck me?” Felix asks, being deliberately rude to get Sylvain to back off, but Sylvain is undeterred. “Not so much,” he agrees.

“I couldn’t be like that,” Felix says. It comes out stilted. “Not in front of him. I don’t—I just couldn’t. Not anymore.”

Felix trusts him, Sylvain realizes, filling in the gaps of what Felix refuses to say. He doesn’t trust Dimitri anymore, not fully, not yet, but he trusts Sylvain.

“That’s a shame, you know,” Sylvain teases, changing course as an apology. “You should be like that in front of everyone.”

Felix cuts his eyes at him. “You’d like that, I bet.”

“No,” Sylvain says, honest, gathering Felix back to his chest and pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “I like being the only one.”

Felix makes a derisive sound, but he’s pink, and he turns pinker when Sylvain brushes aside his hair to run his thumb over the bruise Sylvain had bitten into his pale shoulder. He’d broken skin, which Sylvain hadn’t realized in the moment but which he guesses was sort of the point.

Anyone who comes near him now will know that he belongs to someone. Sylvain doesn't hate that.

“Felix? Sylvain?” Someone raps on the door. Ingrid, Sylvain thinks. Then Annette’s voice comes through, muffled and impatient. “Is either of you alive?”

“We’re both alive,” Sylvain calls. “Great news, Felix is fine now, I fixed him with my—”

A pillow connects with his face, brutally, at top speed. Sylvain stays on his back on the bed where he’s landed, and laughs uproariously as Ingrid says something about lack of class and Annette yells, “Battle? Today? Get clothes on?”

Felix’s clothing is still piled on a chair from when Annette must have first helped him off with it, but Sylvain has to go get his from his travel bags. Before leaving he intercepts Felix when he’s pulling his boots on, dragging him up to his feet and kissing him thoroughly, cupping his face with both hands.

When Sylvain lets him go, Felix is trying very hard to look irritated but it’s somewhat ruined by the blush creeping up his face and the way he absolutely leans into Sylvain to chase his mouth when he first tries to pull back.

“You’re sure you’re okay to fight?” Sylvain asks, which Felix meets with a freezing stare.

“Okay, okay,” Sylvain says. He pauses, and then adds, “Don’t let it go that long again.” He takes Felix’s hand and presses his lips to the palm. “Promise?”

“I don’t see that there’s any need to, now that we’ve worked out a satisfactory solution,” Felix says, lofty. He tugs his hand back so he can do up his sword belt and says over one shoulder, arch, “Anyway, you seemed to like it.”

“Felix,” Sylvain says again, and Felix huffs and turns back. “Fine, I won’t, I swear, are you happy?”

“Yes,” Sylvain says, grinning. He’s so happy. He’s never been this happy in his life.

Felix makes a derisive sound. “Easy to please.”

“So are you,” Sylvain says, winking, and Felix goes crimson.

The second pillow comes very close to decapitating Sylvain as he makes for the door.