Work Text:
They’re getting spread too thinly. From his position high in the skies, Sylvain can see the professor straining to keep the group together as they push forward through the small Imperial city. They had started the battle with a two-pronged attack, but the reinforcement of demonic beasts have sent their strategy into chaos.
Sylvain blocks an incoming javelin with the head of his axe, deflecting it off course and flies up a few feet higher, dodging a hail of enemy arrows. His wyvern roars and Sylvain reaches for his Tomahawk, hurling it towards an enemy flyer that is closing in on Ingrid. The flyer goes down to his hit and then Ingrid wheels her mount towards him, nodding her thanks. She swoops off, heading lower to the ground.
She has the advantage over him here with her strengths in resistance to withstand magical assaults. Sylvain has been pushed higher and higher into the skies by the archers and mages who seem very interested in taking out his flying battalion. He had scattered his group and he’s mostly alone now as he searches the battleground below him.
A flash of red catches his eye as it darts up the left flank, pulling away from the rest of their army. Sylvain’s heart jumps.
“Annette!” he yells, but he’s too far away for her to hear him.
He curses under his breath as he watches the tiny redheaded mage push forward into an area that isn’t safely controlled by their side of the battlefield. He looks around the skies around him, but Ingrid, the only other person who might be able to see Annette, is thoroughly distracted by taking down a mage battalion that is bothering Felix. Sylvain bites back a harder curse and pushes his wyvern into a steep dive, following Annette.
She’s advancing towards a demonic beast, but she’s also getting further away from the core of their army and her battalion keeps falling further and further behind her, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed. Annette disappears behind the curve of an old tower and Sylvain tightens his grip on his axe, flying after her.
“Annette!” he cries out again. This time she does hear him, freezing and snapping her head back towards him.
“Sylvain?” she yells back.
He realizes two mistakes he has made then: first, his dive is all or nothing and he has no way to pull out of it, and second, he has drawn Annette’s attention to him and away from the demonic beast that is just ahead of her.
Sylvain desperately, yanks his wyvern out of the dive and as his mount starts to correct its flight, he jumps. He hits the ground hard and he rolls, trying to absorb as much of the impact as he can. His axe skids away, but he doesn’t have the luxury of trying to grab it again. Annette seems completely bewildered at his sudden, almost death-defying leap. Sylvain grabs her around the waist and tries to drag her to the side, but there’s a wailing screech from the demonic beast and a loud crack as it slams itself against the crumbled stone building next to them.
Sylvain stumbles over the uneven ground, still hauling Annette with him. His legs are aching from the leap from his wyvern and he’s honestly shocked that he hadn’t broken anything. Although, with the adrenaline flooding his veins, he’s not entirely sure that he hasn’t. The ground shakes underneath him and he steals a look down at the old stone. It’s probably just a result of the rampaging demonic beast that pursues them.
Annette twists in his grip, throwing her hand out and sending a violent gust of wind in the direction of the demonic beast. It howls as the wind slices across its hide and Sylvain thinks for a second that Annette has done enough to ward it off.
And then the stones beneath their feet crumble down and he and Annette are plummeting down into darkness. Sylvain loses his grip on Annette as they fall and he lands flat on his back, a piercing pain shooting through his chest. He rolls immediately and then regrets the motion as he feels heat and pain grip his back.
His legs go completely numb and he shoves himself up off the ground into a sitting position as he looks around for Annette. She scrambles to her feet, looking miraculously mostly unhurt as her head whips around, taking in the tunnel they seem to have fallen into.
There’s a roar from above them and Sylvain looks up just in time to watch more rocks collapse in as the demonic beast tumbles down after them, flailing. Its tail swings out, catching the edge of the stone tower and there’s an awful creaking noise before the tower comes down after the beast, collapsing over the hole in the ground, sealing them in the tunnel in the dark with a demonic beast.
Sylvain reaches for his axe, only to remember that he had lost it when he had jumped. He has the Lance of Ruin, thank the goddess, and he grips it tightly. The weapon flares to life like a torch, glowing dimly in the pitch darkness. Annette gasps and hurries to his side, grabbing his arm and trying to pull him up.
Sylvain’s back and chest scream in pain as he moves and he almost collapses as soon as he tries to put weight on his feet. His legs feel like jelly beneath him and he slumps into Annette who lets out a shocked yelp and barely manages to keep him upright. Sylvain keeps one arm slung around Annette and the other hand tightly on his lance.
The Relic lights up a small circle around them, but outside of its radius, they are entombed in darkness. The growl of the demonic beast resonates off the stone chamber and Sylvain bites back a curse. Sylvain spots harsh yellow eyes in the gloom that reflect the red light cast by the Relic and this time he does swear.
Annette lights her hand with a Fire spell, holding it up as she also tries to support Sylvain’s weight as best as she can. “Sylvain,” she mutters. “What do we do?”
“Ideally, not die,” he grumbles, adjusting his grip on his lance.
Felix looks up just in time to see Sylvain’s wyvern drop into a deep, spiralling dive. It’s an alarming maneuver that Sylvain hardly ever makes and Felix’s stomach twists, but he doesn’t have time to consider it as he ducks behind a crumbled stone building, dodging out of the way of an enemy mage’s Thoron.
The lightning causes his hair to prickle with its intensity, but before he can whip out from behind his cover, he hears the mage shout out. Felix whirls out, brandishing the Sword of Moralta just in time to see Ingrid pulling Lúin out of the back of the mage’s chest. Felix nods to her in thanks.
With her flight maneuverability and her high resistance, Ingrid has an advantage here, but she’ll be screwed if an archer gets too close. Felix, on instinct, swaps his sword and shield for his bow, stringing an arrow and firing it at the archer that rounds the corner who had been about to aim for Ingrid.
“Thanks!” she yells to him, spinning her lance and swinging into another diving jab at another of the mages.
Felix grunts in response and strings another arrow, this one sinking into the throat of another archer trying to creep through the ruins. Felix sticks to his bow to counter the enemy archers while Ingrid clears out the last of the mages. Once she pulls Lúin out of the chest of the last mage, she wheels her pegasus around to him.
Felix, now that he’s not under immediate threat of having his flesh burned off by lightning, squints back up at the sky, searching for Sylvain’s wyvern. Ingrid follows his gaze and dismounts, jogging over to him.
“What is it?” she asks.
Felix points in the direction that he saw Sylvain dive. “He dove over there.”
Ingrid tenses. “What?” Her head snaps up to the sky as she takes a combing look through the skies at the flying units that remained flying at the elevated height. Her brow knits and Felix looks up as she points at something.
There’s a band of wyvern riders just to the south of them, engaged in combat with some enemies, but there is no sign of Sylvain’s bright red hair.
“That’s his battalion, isn’t it?” Felix says, his stomach sinking.
Ingrid nods. “But, where is he?”
“Felix! Ingrid!”
Felix whips around at the sound of Mercedes’s voice. The healer is running towards them, stumbling through the crumbled ruins. Felix and Ingrid exchange a glance and jog towards Mercedes, closing the gap between them quickly. Mercedes is breathing heavily and she looks worried and Felix’s hand flexes on his sword’s hilt instinctively.
“What happened?” he asks hurriedly.
Mercedes shakes her head. “I don’t know where Annette is. She was on the left, but then she pushed forward and I lost sight of her. Her battalion lost her too.”
Ingrid frowns immediately. “Wasn’t there a demonic beast on the left flank?”
Mercedes nods. “Yes! That’s why we’re worried.”
“Fuck,” Felix curses suddenly as something clicks in his head. He had watched Sylvain dive towards the left flank.
Ingrid looks at him. “What?”
“Sylvain went after her.”
Ingrid goes white. “Oh no.”
The thought of Sylvain, a reckless idiot, and Annette, who is so distracted she trips on things that are right in front of her sometimes, alone together on a battlefield makes Felix antsy. It doesn’t spell out anything good for the rest of them.
“Go,” he urges, pushing Ingrid’s shoulder towards her pegasus.
She frowns and looks like she’s about to say something where there’s a loud, distracting roar behind him. Felix whips around, sliding Aegis off his back and bringing up the Sword of Moralta just in time to deflect a heavy rock hurled their way by a snarling demonic beast. Ingrid breaks away from them immediately, hauling into her saddle and Mercedes sends a blistering Bolganone towards the beast.
It howls, rearing back and Felix charges, sword in hand. He slides under its first clumsy swipe and digs his sword into its front leg. It roars at him and swings again. He lifts his shield this time and catches the heavy blow on his Relic. Aegis glows and absorbs the impact so that he only slides back in the dirt a few feet.
There’s a glint of red as Ingrid cuts in from overhead with her Relic and then a burst of blue as Mercedes shoots off her own Thoron. Felix slashes again, weaving around the side of the demonic beast as he feels a flare of energy surge in him when his Crest activates, adding some extra force to his blow.
The ground rumbles beneath his feet and Felix leaps back on instinct, rolling as he hits the ground and dives away from the demonic beast. Ingrid’s shout rings in his ears as there’s a streak of red light as she activates the power of her Relic, driving it down in a burning comet. The beast howls at the blow, but shudders and falls to the ground.
Ingrid is still wreathed in red light above him as Felix rights himself on his feet. He sheathes his sword and lets the glow fade from his own Relic as he strides back to the fallen body of the beast. Mercedes stands a few feet away, unharmed, and she holds up a hand in his direction. A pulse of white healing magic sweeps over him, soothing the aches Felix hadn’t even noticed he was harbouring.
Ingrid circles the sky above him like she’s antsy. Felix frowns. “Ingrid!” he yells out and she looks down at him. “Go! I’ll be right behind you.”
She doesn’t wait further than that, tearing off through the sky in a blur of white and blue towards the left flank where their friends had last been seen. Felix watches her go for a second before he looks back at Mercedes.
“Are you coming?”
She looks torn. “I want to, but I have to keep moving forward.”
“Go, then,” Felix urges. “We’ll find them. You get to the others.”
Annette doesn’t want to, but she ends up having to step away from Sylvain. She needs both of her hands to cast effectively and Sylvain needs both arms to attack properly too. She tries not to think about the way that the beast lashes out in the small, contained cavern and the way that Sylvain is basically only holding himself up using the shaft of his lance.
She waves off a last Cutting Gale with a shout and the demonic beast lets out one last wailing roar before it slumps down, falling on its side. Annette stumbles, her breath heaving and her heart pounding. She feels like she had just run from one end of the Dominic estate to the other without stopping and her ears buzz from the ripping wind of her magic.
Her ankle throbs because she landed on it funny when they had fallen through the ground into whatever collapsed tunnel or cavern they are in. When the demonic beast falls, Annette calls a small flame into her hand to give herself some light. She scans through the darkness for the glow of Sylvain’s Relic and her heart skips a beat when she realizes that she can’t see it anywhere.
“Sylvain!” she yells out.
“Here!” he calls back, but he sounds weak.
Annette slowly picks her way through the darkness, biting her lip as she holds her flame in front of her to guide herself. Her foot catches on a loose brick and she almost trips right into her own fire and yelps. She manages not to fall as she finally catches sight of Sylvain. His Relic is flickering faintly orange and he’s pinned under the now dead body of the demonic beast.
Annette gasps and hurries towards him. “Oh no, oh no,” she says, her hands flailing a bit as she tries to figure out how to help.
Sylvain chuckles, but in the dim gloom, she can just barely catch the wince of pain that shoots across his face. “Hey, Annette, care to help a guy out?”
She bites her lip again and extinguishes her flame. She shoves at the demonic beast as hard as she can, but it doesn’t budge. Annette huffs and pushes back her hair, her forehead sticky with sweat from the exertion of shoving and the number of spells she had slung at the beast. Sylvain grunts in pain when she pushes on the beast and she stops, looking down at him.
He has a cut on his hairline and his face looks gaunt in the flickering light of his Relic. He’s grimacing in pain now and Annette knows that they could be in trouble if she can’t get him free.
“Help me sit up,” he requests.
Annette wants to protest, but she doesn’t have the physical strength to move the corpse herself so she will need his help. She leans down, grabbing Sylvain by his arms and pulls him into a sitting position. He hisses a curse through his teeth when he moves, but when Annette stops, feeling worried he shakes his head.
“Come on,” he says, nodding towards the beast pinning his legs.
Together, their combined strength is enough to budge the beast just far enough that Sylvain can reach down and jerk his legs free. Annette immediately strikes up another flame in her palm and her breath catches as she looks down at Sylvain. His left leg is twisted in a direction that it’s definitely not supposed to be facing and there is a dark red patch on his undershirt which looks like it’s coming from his torso.
“Sylvain,” she mutters, feeling suddenly very afraid. She feels a bit dizzy and then and she drops down to her knees next to him.
He gives her a grin, but Annette sees through it to the pain he’s pushing down. “Any chance you’ve got any White Magic prepared?”
Annette’s eyes widen as she immediately drops her Fire spell to place her hand over his stomach. Her palm glows white as the light transfers across to his wound. Sylvain hisses at the touch, but he relaxes after a moment as her Faith magic heals him a little. Heal isn’t the strongest spell, but it had been the first one to pop into her mind.
“I’m so, so sorry!” she apologizes, her shoulders slumping. “We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been so careless up there and now you’re hurt!”
Sylvain chuckles. “Hey, Annette, it’s okay.” She lifts her head, her lip trembling as she tries to hold back tears. There’s still a wrinkle in his brow as he pushes away more pain. “That helped,” he promises.
She sits back on her heels and then winces as pain shoots through her ankle. She adjusts, pulling her feet to the side and she stares at the blossoming purple bruise on her ankle. “Oh,” she mumbles.
“Here,” Sylvain says, reaching out to her. His hand touches her shin and a thread of White Magic drifts down from his fingertips to cover her own injury. The bruise fades a little and Annette smiles weakly.
“Why are you so good at that?” she mumbles, trying to push down the prickle of jealousy in her stomach. She feels stupid then because she and Mercie have been working on Recover, but it’s just not quite there yet.
Sylvain shrugs. “I dunno, you’re not bad yourself.”
She pouts. “Don’t treat me like a child, Sylvain. If you were down here with Mercie, she’d already have your leg all fixed and I can’t even heal your stomach properly!”
“My back, actually,” Sylvain corrects.
Annette covers her face with her hands. “That’s worse!” Her mind spins as she recalls the White Magic tome she had read about back and spinal injuries. “Can you move your legs?” she asks quietly after a moment, slowly inching her hands down enough until she’s looking at Sylvain.
He grits his teeth and then his right foot twitches and Annette exhales in relief. Sylvain coughs then, lifting a hand to his mouth. He drops his Relic in the motion and the light flickers to nothing, submerging them in darkness again.
Annette leans forward, pumping another Heal into Sylvain. In the glow of her white magic, she sees that his face has somehow gotten paler and that there’s a spot of blood on his lips. Taking a deep breath, she leans forward, gently pressing against his chest.
“Fuck!” Sylvain curses, trying to lean away from her and Annette sighs deeply.
“I think your ribs are broken too.”
Sylvain must drop his hand back to his Relic because its glow flickers back, a faint orangey-yellow light illuminating them.
“How are your ribs?” he asks, nodding towards her.
Annette blinks and looks down. The front of her dress is stained with blood that she realizes, belatedly, is hers, not Sylvain’s. She shifts, extending her legs as she touches her own stomach warily. Her skin tingles and she observes the gash on her stomach, probably from the fall down.
“Oh,” she mumbles. “I’m okay, I think. It’s not deep.”
She looks up at towards the caved in stone above them. If Sylvain’s leg had been ok, maybe he could have stood on the back of the demonic beast and tried to pry at the ceiling, but he’s definitely not standing and she’s much too short to be of any help in that department.
It’s quiet between them, just Sylvain’s faintly wheezing breaths and Annette’s shaky ones as she tries not to cry.
“Sylvain!” Ingrid yells again. Her voice breaks on his name and she blinks hard, forcing back the tears that threaten to prick in her eyes. She can’t cry, the tears will impede her vision and she needs to be on the lookout for Sylvain or Annette’s bright red hair.
Felix is combing the ground beneath her as Ingrid sticks to the skies, scouring for a glimpse of Sylvain’s wyvern in the fog that is starting to nestle around the battlefield. Unfortunately, all Ingrid sees is the retreating flyers of the enemy as Dimitri and the others capture the far side of the field. She swoops back down towards the ground, swallowing a lump in her throat.
Many of the old stone structures around here are crumbled and even the ground is uneven. As she descends from the sky, the pained cry of a wyvern catches her attention and she pivots sharply towards it, clutching Lúin, and standing up in her saddle. She sees the wyvern then, half-pinned under the rubble of a destroyed building, roaring and straining as it tries to free itself.
Ingrid quickly lands her mount and jumps from the saddle, jogging towards the wyvern. It bears tack branded with the Kingdom’s roaring lion, and it quiets as she approaches. Ingrid swallows back the worry that seeds in her chest as she reaches around, pulling bricks and chunks of stone off of the poor wyvern until it can break free.
Her breath catches as it emerges fully because there’s a long white scar along the right flank of it which Ingrid clearly remembers berating Sylvain about after he had been hit with a ballista shot while protecting her. The wyvern croons, turning towards her, its eyes filled with hurt. Ingrid strokes its face, her lips pressing together uncertainly. The wear in the saddle and the brand of Gautier on the side bag attached to it confirm her suspicions: this is Sylvain’s mount.
“Where’s your rider?” she asks, fear coiling in her gut.
A crunch of stone alerts her to the arrival of someone else and she turns to see Felix jogging over to her. His step stutters as he notices that Ingrid is standing in front of a wyvern and then he hastens his pace over to her, frowning.
“Is that?” he asks, the last part of his question dying out.
Ingrid nods. “It’s definitely Sylvain’s mount. Any sign of them on the ground?”
Felix shakes his head, frowning. “What the hell is he doing off of his mount?”
Ingrid frowns. “He would only dismount if he needed to and since,” she pauses, looking around, “he’s not here that means that-” she trails off.
“He needed to,” Felix finishes. “Fuck!” he snarls, spinning away from Ingrid, jerking at his hair. “Stupid idiot.”
“Felix!” Ingrid snaps. “We need to keep looking.”
Felix takes a short breath and nods to her. “Where was the wyvern?”
She nods to the pile of rubble beside her. Felix beckons her over, and together they dig through the rubble searching for any sign of either of their friends. The only things that they find are stones scorched with acid from the poisonous attacks of demonic beasts. Ingrid swallows heavily.
“This isn’t good.”
Felix looks around. “If this is here, it means there was a beast here somewhere too.”
Ingrid shakes her head, her eyes burning again. “Annette and Sylvain alone against one of those are not odds I like.”
She spins away from the rubble, stalking around the broken building until her eye is caught by a glint of metal. She kneels, pushing aside some heavier stones until she exposes the head of a silvered axe. She bites her lip as she digs the rest of it out until she sees the burnished steel blade and brassy-gold hilt of Hauteclere, the legendary axe that Sylvain had been wielding from the back of his wyvern.
She lifts the axe and it’s heavy and cold in her grip. “Felix!” she calls. “They were definitely here.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. He rounds the edge of another crumpled building, holding up a short, splintered black staff.
“Oh no,” Ingrid murmurs.
Felix is holding a magic staff that looks startlingly similar to the one that Annette uses. His knuckles tighten around it and Ingrid sinks down, sitting on a piece of rubble, still clutching Sylvain’s axe as she stares at it.
“Where are they?” she asks, feeling dismayed and hopeless.
Sylvain’s weapon is too heavy for her and she drops it to the ground by her feet, watching the light reflect in the blade. She and Felix have searched the entire area. Unless they are supposed to dig up every collapsed building and tower, Ingrid has no idea how they are supposed to find Sylvain and Annette.
Guilt pricks in her stomach. Sylvain had obviously seen Annette pulling away from the left flank from the air. If he had seen her, Ingrid also probably could have, but she hadn’t been looking. Now both of her friends are missing and she feels like throwing up.
Felix stalks over to her and frowns. “Are you just going to give up then?”
Ingrid shoots to her feet, anger flaring through her. “What?”
He waves around them. “We have to keep looking.”
“Felix, they’re not here! We looked everywhere!” she snaps fiercely.
She starts to turn away from him, tears burning her eyes and he grabs her arm, spinning her back towards him. He leans forward, bumping their foreheads hard enough together that it almost hurts.
“Don’t give up,” he says firmly. “They’re here somewhere.” He holds up Annette’s broken staff and she sees him swallow raggedly. “They have to be.”
Ingrid closes her eyes and keeps their foreheads pressed together for a minute. She knows that Felix cares about Annette, that he would do anything for her, and the panic pressing at her stomach at the thought of losing Sylvain makes her wonder if she would do anything for him too.
She pulls away from Felix and takes a bracing breath. “They have to be,” she repeats. She squares her shoulders. “Come on.”
He nods and they return to their search.
Annette looks like she’s buzzing with nervous energy and like she might bubble up and boil over any second. Sylvain tilts his neck, trying to stretch the strain in it, and winces when his back aches. Annette had done her best with her White Magic to heal him, but it’s certainly not her strength.
Sylvain, against Annette’s wishes, had dragged himself up against a piece of rubble so he could lean more comfortable and ease the pain in his probably-broken ribs. He had certainly taken the fall harder than she did and then he hadn’t made his situation better by getting up close and personal with the demonic beast. Sylvain is honestly just impressed with himself for not getting his face burned off by poison.
“Annette,” he says to her. Her head snaps towards him and he smiles faintly. “We’ll be okay. They’ll be looking for us,” he assures.
Annette’s shoulders heave with a deep breath and she shifts closer to him. “What if they aren’t?”
Sylvain laughs and then immediately regrets doing so, flinching at the pain in his ribs. “Felix is probably turning over every damn stone on that battlefield looking for you, Mercie right there with him.”
Annette blinks at him. Her blue-green eyes are wide and rimmed in red from the tears she had cried. She had tried to hide them from him, but Sylvain had been able to see the shakes in her shoulders that betrayed her.
“What?”
Sylvain’s lips curl into a smile as he breathes out slowly, pushing back the buzzing pain in his chest. “Felix will be looking for you,” he repeats. “You should have seen the fit he almost threw when he found out that you were going to be deployed on the opposite flank from him. It was pretty funny.”
Sylvain is pretty sure she blushes at that comment, but it’s hard to tell when their only light comes from the red-tinged glow of his Relic. He has the lance draped across his lap so that he can keep a hand on it to keep the Crest stone activated to give them a light that doesn’t drain Annette’s magic resources.
“You know,” he continues, trying to keep the conversation going. He worries that if he doesn’t, Annette might explode with all of the worries building up in her. “We never got to have that tea after your practice the other day.”
She smiles weakly. “This isn’t exactly the best place for tea.”
“I’ve been in worse.”
“Really?”
“Got stuck in a well once. This beats that any day,” he says, trying to keep his voice light. A bit of bitterness creeps into his tone and he hopes that she misses it.
The narrowing of her eyes tells him that she doesn’t and Sylvain prepares for the barrage of questions.
“Was that because of your brother?” she asks.
He blinks. He hadn’t expected her to already know that one. “Uh,” he hesitates.
Annette looks down, her hands fidgeting. “Ingrid and Felix accidentally brought it up when we were at the Training Grounds a little while ago.”
“Oh,” Sylvain says. It’s a fair explanation. “Well, like I said, this beats the well any day.”
“I wish I’d been around when you were younger too, Sylvain,” Annette says suddenly. Her eyes harden with a stubborn determination that makes her look almost adorable.
“Really?”
She smiles. “Could have helped show your brother who was boss!”
Sylvain laughs and then it breaks into a cough and he almost doubles over from the ache in his chest. Annette leans towards him, worriedly, and helps him straighten up. He huffs out a breath once the cough subsides and wipes at his mouth, rubbing away the fleck of blood on his lip.
“I think we did a good enough job of that back during the Academy days. Showed him real good.”
Sylvain drops his eyes to the lance draped across his lap and Annette looks down too. Her hair glows even redder in the light, turning it almost the same colour as his. Her hands curl into fists and she frowns.
“I’m sorry I got us into this, Sylvain. And I’m sorry I’m not a better healer.”
“Hey, don’t apologize,” he says firmly. “I made the choice to come after you and I don’t regret it for a second, okay? And besides, you did great. My back feels great.”
Annette huffs. “But your ribs don’t and that doesn’t begin to cover that ,” she mutters, waving a hand to his twisted leg.
Sylvain stares at his leg. The way that his knee is bent makes him feel kind of ill, so he shifts the Lance of Ruin, guiding the light of it away from his leg so that he can’t see how crooked his toes are compared to where they should be pointing.
“Think of it this way,” he says, “without you and all those Cutting Gales and Excaliburs, I definitely couldn’t have killed the demonic beast.”
That almost draws a smile out of her, but then her lips twist down again. “I should be able to use Recover by now. Mercie and I have been working for weeks on it!”
Sylvain leans his head back until it hits stone and he closes his eyes, breathing through his nose over the twisted pain of his leg and ribs. “I think that’s your problem,” he suggests. “You overthink it. Reason comes from the world around us, right? That’s what all those fancy books say, anyway. Faith is more of an internalized type of magic. It’s a belief, remember?”
He opens his eyes and blinks at her. She’s watching him now with a curious expression.
“You know, Sylvain, for someone who pretends to be so stupid, you’re really smart. You said all that stuff the other day about knowing that your laziness isn’t going to get you anywhere, but I don’t think you’re lazy at all.” She nudges his arm. “I definitely wouldn’t have made it alone against that beast without your help so it was pretty smart of you to come after me.”
Sylvain smiles and closes his eyes again. Annette shifts and then she leans against his shoulder, her head resting against the top of his bicep.
“Thanks, Sylvain,” she says.
By the time that the rest of the Blue Lions regroup with them, it feels like Felix and Ingrid have made no progress in looking for Sylvain and Annette. Adrenaline is still surging through Felix’s body because he has to find his friends and he knows that they have to be around. Sylvain’s a big guy so, theoretically, he should be hard to miss, but Annette is Annette.
She’s small enough to almost fit under his chin which means that she’s small enough to be hidden in a dozen nooks and crannies around the destroyed battlefield.
He almost doesn’t notice when Mercedes heals him again because he’s so set on digging through the rubble. Dedue takes a spot next to him wordlessly, helping him heft away a larger chunk of stone, while Dimitri and the professor search closer towards where the left flank had originally been pushing. Ashe is helping Ingrid look around, putting his keen sniper’s eye to good use.
Felix and Dedue clear away the last piece of a broken wall to no avail and Felix growls in his chest, irritation flaring up. Dedue doesn’t say anything to that: he just moves onto the next section of rubble to clear.
Felix kicks a stone away and it clatters lightly across the stones. He stops. It sounded strange. He might be completely imagining that fact, but it had sounded strange, he knows it did. He pulls a dagger off his belt and drops it, hilt first, to the ground. It makes the same almost echoing noise when it clatters to the stone.
His mind reels and he whips around. “Ingrid! Ashe! Do you know anything about this area?”
Ingrid frowns at him, dusting off her hands. “What?”
Felix waves a hand. “Historically. Anything that might be useful here.”
He can practically see the gears working in Ingrid’s head. Never before has Felix been so glad that Ingrid is such a bookworm and that she works so hard in all sides of her studies, not just the physical areas like he had. Her lips part and she drops to her knees, knocking her gauntlet against the ground.
She practically jumps up to her feet. “Tunnels! There were rumours that this area used to be littered with old tunnels.”
Felix spins around and sees the largest tower in the area, over by Dimitri and Byleth. “The ground could have given out,” he says.
“Yes,” Ashe agrees. “If there was significant force applied, the stones up here could have given out!”
The three of them exchange a look before they run for the collapsed tower. Dedue follows after them and Felix stops just around the tower, studying the ground. There are large, spider-webbing cracks in the stone where the tower had buckled to and Felix, almost reflexively, stomps hard against the stone.
A crack widens.
He exchanges a look with Ingrid. “This is it,” he says. “They have to be buried under here!”
Ingrid moves closer to the tower, crouching down by a small gap under the tower. She slides her hand in and then is able to make her arm disappear up to her elbow. She retracts her arm after a second, bending over further.
“Annette? Sylvain?” she calls into the small crevice.
At first, there is nothing and Felix’s heart sinks into his stomach. Dimitri opens his mouth to speak, but then he’s cut off by a yelping noise coming from the crack that Ingrid had shouted into.
“Ingrid!” Annette’s voice sounds muffled and faint, but it’s definitely her. Felix’s heart hammers as he tries to step up next to Ingrid.
Ashe grabs his arm to stop him. “Wait,” the archer urges, “if the ground is weak, we don’t want to send any rocks down on them.”
Felix tenses, but he does stop advancing. “What can we do?”
Byleth circles around the tower, stepping lightly. “Ingrid, ask them where they are. If we break through the ground away from the tower a bit, we should be able to stop it from coming down on top of them.”
Ingrid relays the message to Annette and Felix can just barely catch the directions that Annette shouts back up to them: she’s with Sylvain and they’re almost directly under the hole that Ingrid has found. Ingrid stands up, looking at Byleth who has paced a dozen steps away from the tower.
Felix watches as she reaches back, drawing her blade and cracking it across the ground in front of her. The spine of the Sublime Creator Sword crackles with energy as it whips across the stone with a deafening crack, but then there’s a louder creaking noise as heavy cracks spread through the stone, giving under the strength of her blow.
Dimitri steps over, thrusting the hilt of Areadbhar against the ground until it cracks loudly and the stones buckle away. Ingrid and Felix hurry around the tower to the hole that they have created and peer down into almost complete blackness. Felix pulls his shield off his back, igniting the light in his relic and he directs it down.
From the hole that they had punched, it’s about a 10-foot drop and he doesn’t think twice before dropping down into the gap.
Felix’s eyes burn in the darkness as the dim light of his Relic becomes almost blinding. Above him, he hears Dimitri call his name, but his blood is rushing in his ears as he scans the darkness around him. The only other light in the room is a faint red glow and Felix strides towards it, using his shield as a guiding light.
“Felix?”
He barely has a chance to register Annette’s voice before her face is illuminated by his shield as she throws herself into him, burying her face into his chest as she gasps and hugs him fiercely. Felix wraps an arm around her immediately pressing his cheek to her red hair as he breathes out in relief.
“Thank Sothis,” he mutters, clinging to Annette.
He glances past her to the dim red light and realizes that it’s the pulsing Crest stone of the Lance of Ruin. He stiffens and Annette pulls back from his chest. He can see the fear and uncertainty in her expression.
“He passed out,” she says quietly. “His leg is all messed up and I couldn’t help him and,” her voice breaks as she bursts into tears and Felix pulls her back into a tighter hug.
He twists, shouting back over his shoulder. “They’re here! Mercedes, Sylvain needs healing urgently!”
There’s a thud behind him and then Lúin’s light flickers into view as Ingrid drops into the gap, hurrying across the pit towards Sylvain. She kneels at his side and Felix’s arms tighten around Annette.
Hours later, they’ve been dug from their hole and brought back to camp. Annette’s ankle has been fully healed thanks to Mercie’s touch. Mercedes had sent her right back to her tent to rest and Annette feels antsy as she reclines on her cot. The professor had given her a talking to about breaking away from formation but had followed that with a firm hug and by saying she is glad that Annette isn’t too badly hurt.
Annette sits up on her bed, taking a deep breath. She has hardly seen Sylvain since they had been brought back to camp and she’s still worried. He had passed out from the pain while they had waited to be rescued and Annette’s lip still hurts from where she had been biting it in panic. She doesn’t know what’s happening with Sylvain and if her White Magic had messed anything up for him.
She stands up, testing her ankle. It doesn’t hurt and she nods to herself. She’s going to go make sure that Sylvain is okay. She owes him that much since he totally saved her today and she hadn’t been good enough to heal him like someone else might have been able to.
Annette is about to leave her tent when someone else pulls the fabric back and steps inside. Annette blinks as Felix steps into her tent, his shoulders tense. He looks exhausted and there’s a smudge of dirt on his face that doesn’t make her feel less confident that he has taken care of himself.
“Hi,” she greets, blinking.
Felix frowns. “Why are you standing?”
Annette glances past him to the entrance to her tent. “I was going to go see how Sylvain is doing. I’m fine, I promise!”
Felix scowls at her and grabs her by the upper arms, turning her around and marching her back towards her bed. “You are absolutely not fine. Your ankle isn’t fully healed and neither is that cut on your stomach, by the way. Plus, that doesn’t even begin to tackle the fact that Mercedes says you seriously overexerted your magic today.”
“Felix, I’m fine, really!” she complains, pulling out of his grip.
She spins back to face him and her breath catches when she realizes how close to her that he is standing. His amber eyes are burning with something that makes her stomach flip and she blinks at him, feeling a bit caught out.
“Um, Felix,” she mumbles.
He hugs her. His arms are strong and firm in the hug and he still smells like dust and sweat and battle. Annette digs her fingers into his jacket in return and blinks back the tears that prick at her eyes. She rests her head against his chest and listens to him breathe as he keeps her close against his chest.
“Felix,” she mumbles again, a little louder.
“You scared me,” he confesses suddenly. “When Mercedes said that you were breaking off to the left flank on your own, I almost lost my mind. I knew Sylvain had gone that way and then when we couldn’t find either of you...”
His arms loosen around her and Annette leans back, staring up at Felix. He looks startlingly honest and worried and she smiles at him.
“We’re okay,” she assures. “We looked after each other.”
Felix sighs, lifting a hand and brushing back a strand of her hair. “You went down there with a demonic beast. We found Hauteclere and your staff.” He shakes his head. “You got lucky.”
“Maybe,” she agrees, “but Sylvain had his Relic and I had my spells.” She wiggles her fingers at him.
Felix frowns at the bruises along the tips of her fingers that come from magic kickback. They’re not usually so noticeable after a battle, but Annette can’t deny that she did probably overexert herself and over-cast for what she was prepared to do, especially with the healing she had tried to give Sylvain.
“Don’t do it again,” Felix says.
Annette’s eyes widen. “What?”
“Don’t do stupid things when I can’t be there for you.”
Her heart flips as she tries to dissect the hidden meaning behind his words. “You can’t be with me all the time, you know. And I tend to be pretty inclined to do stupid things.”
Felix leans down, resting his forehead against hers as he breathes out slowly. Annette keeps her eyes open and she can feel a flush settling in her cheekbones as Felix’s eyes shut and he keeps their heads pressed together. It feels almost weird to see Felix look this vulnerable. It’s kind of nice, she decides silently, as warmth prickles in her stomach.
“Hey, Felix,” she says quietly.
He opens his eyes, looking at her and breathing shallowly. “What?”
“I’m sorry for worrying you.”
His expression twists. “Don’t apologize,” he says firmly. “Just don’t do it again.”
Annette bites her lip and watches his eyes track down to it. The heat in her cheeks doubles and she tilts her head up the tiniest bit. There’s only a hair’s gap between their lips now, but Felix doesn’t pull away as she expects him too.
His chin tilts down as his lips ghost against hers, the touch feather-light. Annette curls her hands in his jacket and kisses him more firmly. Felix meets her with equal pressure, a warm, calloused hand coming up to cup her face as he kisses her back. Annette hums into the kiss and rocks up on her tiptoes, sliding her arms around his neck.
Against her lips, Felix murmurs, “no more stupid things.”
She laughs and he almost dips her back as he kisses her again. “Okay.”
“Especially not with Sylvain,” he mutters.
Annette breaks the kiss then, her lips pulling into a light frown. “Is he?”
Felix nods, tightening his arms around her. “He’s fine. Mercedes and the professor looked after him.”
“I still think I should go see him.”
“Absolutely not,” Felix says. “We’re staying here.”
He backs her up until her knees bump her cot and she sits down. He hesitates then and Annette pulls him down so that he’s lying next to her. She suddenly feels incredibly sleepy as she rolls into Felix, slinging an arm over his waist. His lips brush against her hairline.
“I’m going to nap,” she informs him.
“Okay,” he replies softly.
“You’d better be here when I wake up.”
Sylvain’s face looks oddly peaceful when he’s asleep. There’s a bandage stuck to his forehead that makes his hair stick up funny and his leg is completely splinted and set by a wooden brace. Mercedes had had to do a good deal of work on his ribs too, but she has assured Ingrid that Sylvain will be fine, he’ll just need time to recover.
It certainly hasn’t made her want to leave him alone, especially since the last time she took her eyes off of him, he had dived from the sky and gotten himself into this mess. Ingrid presses her lips together and tightens her grip on his hand. She’s holding it cupped between both of her hands and his fingers feel cool in her hand.
She’s used to Sylvain exuding sunshine and warmth and complaining about always being too hot. She’s not used to him being quiet and still and flat against a cot in the medical bay after exhausting himself while seriously injured.
The last time she had been here with him it had been a simpler affair where Mercedes had just sewn eight stitches into the gash on his leg while she had lectured him. This time, it’s not as simple because Sylvain still hasn’t woken up since they recovered him and Annette from the caved-in tunnel where they had been trapped, even when they had very painfully set his broken leg.
Annette had explained that Sylvain and she had fallen down there with the demonic beast and managed to kill it, but that its last action had been crushing his lower body. Annette had been completely distraught about not being able to heal Sylvain and Ingrid had sent Felix off to find her both to ease his own worries and to soothe hers while she waited with Sylvain.
Lost in thought, Ingrid almost doesn’t notice when his fingers twitch in her grip. She tenses, leaning forward as her eyes snap to his face. His eyebrow twitches and his lips pull into a faint grimace. Ingrid strokes her thumb across the back of his hand, holding her breath. He blinks his eyes open and it takes a second for him to look at her, honey brown eyes fixating on where she’s holding his hand.
“If I had known that breaking my leg would have gotten you to hold my hand, I might have tried that sooner,” he jokes, his voice rasping.
Ingrid frowns immediately and tries to scold him, but the words stick in her throat. Sylvain notices the shift in her expression and his smile slips a little bit.
“Ingrid? I’m not dreaming, am I?”
“No,” she assures. She glances at his bandaged chest and then at his leg. “How do you feel?”
“Very sore,” he admits readily. He winces and lifts the hand that she’s not holding to touch his ribs. “Ouch,” he mutters.
“Don’t touch anything,” Ingrid scolds, but her words sound more worried than anything else.
“Broken ribs, broken leg,” he mutters, “what’s next? A broken heart?”
He’s still joking around and Ingrid drops his hand, biting her lip. “Sylvain,” she says and her voice comes out softer and almost hurt.
He stops moving immediately and looks at her, almost alarmed. “What?”
She sighs. “What were you thinking?”
“That Annette would need help. I did what I had to do, Ing.”
She can’t argue with him. From Annette’s recounting, she definitely had needed Sylvain. But, Ingrid still can’t get rid of the nagging terror that had pressed at her stomach and chest the whole time he had been missing.
“I would have done the same for any of you,” he continues.
“I know,” she says.
“Then,” Sylvain murmurs, scooping her hand back up and squeezing it lightly, “what’s the problem?”
“I didn’t want to lose you,” she mumbles.
Sylvain’s eyes widen a little bit and he tries to sit up. Ingrid looks away, feeling heat bloom in her face. The infirmary tent suddenly feels too small and too hot and she simultaneously wants Sylvain to look anywhere but at her and also for him to never stop looking at her.
It feels too much like a conversation they had had in his room at the Monastery which had ended in a horribly awkward kiss and Ingrid basically running away from him. She has kind of realized by now that she’s probably in love with Sylvain, but she’s still not sure what to do with this information.
“You won’t lose me,” Sylvain says. She looks back at him. He’s sitting a bit more upright against the pillows, staring at her. “You won’t,” he promises.
She frowns. “You keep doing reckless things, Sylvain. How do I know that’s true?”
“Because I love you and I never want to see you hurting and I especially don’t want you to hurt because of me,” he replies immediately.
His eyes are bright and honest and Ingrid’s stomach tightens. “Sylvain.”
“Was I not supposed to say that first part?” he asks, a blush of his own spreading across his face.
Ingrid bites her lip to hide a smile. “Depends on if you’re going to promise me to come back every time,” she says.
“For you? Anything.”
She squeezes his hand and tries to think of something else to say. Sylvain beats her to the punch.
“Hey, Ingrid.” She looks down at him. “Since I’m hurting so badly, I think I’ve earned a kiss for being heroic, haven’t I?”
She wants to smack him. But she does also want to kiss him. She settles on flicking his hand sharply before leaning down and pausing, right above his lips.
“Stay where I can see you,” she says, echoing his words from a month back before she presses her lips to his.
Sylvain kisses her back and his lips are warmer than his hands. Ingrid feels that comfortable warmth spread through to her fingertips and toes even as her neck protests the angle that she’s bent at. Her breath echoes in her ears as she slowly breaks the kiss, still looking at Sylvain’s flushed, parted lips.
She’s about to kiss him again when the tent flap is drawn back with a rustle of fabric and she practically springs away from him. Mercedes blinks, looking between Sylvain and Ingrid and the matching, furious blushes on their faces.
“Oh,” she says. “I can come back later.”
Mercedes disappears back out of the tent and Ingrid groans. Sylvain laughs and squeezes her hand again.
“Ugh,” Ingrid complains. “That’s embarrassing.”
“Hey,” he says and she looks back down at him. “I love you.”
She kisses him again. They have a little more time.