Felix vividly remembers the day Sylvain didn't wake up and Claude tried to reassure him, the things he said in retaliation--the uncertainty. Realistically, they have no way of knowing whether this promise is something they can keep. It's out of their hands. Sylvain told him once before that he'd never leave, and Felix had promised the same, but neither of those promises stopped this from happening.

But Felix is a goal-oriented man. If there is a way to ensure they never go home again, he will find it. At least now he has something to fight for again. It feels so much more important to him now than fighting for Faerghus ever did.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out. The faint edge in his tone when he speaks again isn't anger, but steel. "I know you won't. If you can help it. And neither will I. ...I'm not stupid. I know that regardless of what we intend, it could happen. But listen to me, Sylvain." His fingers clench on his fiance's shoulders. "I will fight for this. I will fight for us. I will never stop fighting until we can keep our promise forever and no one can stop us."

"And I never will."

That much, Felix can promise without reservation. That whatever's in his power to do, he will do, and nothing will get in his way.

The resolution helps banish the panic. Felix shifts to take Sylvain's face in his hands and press a kiss, gentle but firm, to his lips. "The Felix by your side throughout the war may have been too much of a coward to say so, but he loved you, and I love you."

Felix nods, clutching those words tightly to his heart. He wills them across the barriers between worlds, wishing he could go knock some sense into his other self.

But he's spent nine days feeling sorry for himself and constantly worrying, and he's sick of it. Sylvain's awake now, and for now, that's all that matters. The future is back where it belongs, on the other side of dreams, and figuring out how his fight begins can wait a few hours. He can hold tight to what he has here.

Figuratively and literally. He shifts into a more comfortable position for wrapping Sylvain up in his arms again, less desperate this time, and makes sure to leave room for Inda, too.

"I missed you." It's quiet. "Inda did, too. She gave me my birthday gift. I read your letter."

Felix pats Inda's leaves gently. "It was sappy. It was the sappiest thing I've ever seen in my life." He smiles a little, too. "But thank you anyway. That hat is ridiculous, and I look ridiculous in it." ...which is an admission that he put it on and looked in the mirror at least once. Dammit. "...I'm grateful for all of it."

And, as Sylvain has already sort of noticed, the bedsheets smell faintly of his cologne. Because Felix has been a complete mess for over a week.

"You should read that letter, too. Not now, but today. I want you to remember everything you wrote." Maybe, he thinks, the reminder of hope and love and true family will help.

"You'll never believe what Dimitri gave me for my birthday."

Felix snorts quietly and lightly kicks Sylvain for his foolishness. "I'm calling you ridiculous. Don't listen to this idiot, Inda, he's putting words in my mouth."

He's glad he doesn't have to fight Sylvain on reading the letter; he'd half-anticipated he might. At the question, he shakes his head. "Guess."

"A dagger. After all the torture you put him through over it." Felix shakes his head. "He's unbelievable."

But it's fond. He loves the dagger.

"Oh. And Jinx showed me how to make physical copies of photographs. I...took some pictures. Of things you missed while you were asleep. So I could show them to you."

He reluctantly leans away from Sylvain for just a second so he can pull open the drawer in the bedside table and take out a little pile of photos. He immediately returns to exactly where he was, handing the pile to Sylvain.

A lot of the pictures are of Inda and/or Varley, or one or both of them with Felix (Felicity also taught him how to take selfies). A few are of Felix by himself; most of those are from a perspective low to the ground, because Inda took them. There are pictures of them ice skating, having tea, training with others of Felix's and Sylvain's Pokemon, sitting by the window in the early morning light, cuddling up together under the blankets...there's a series of seven selfies, one taken each morning, of just Felix with a sleeping Sylvain. They have a quiet, solemn air to them, but they're also the softest pictures of the bunch.

There's also one of all of Felix's birthday presents gathered on the table, and one each of Felix having tea with Dimitri, Claude, and Annette. There are a few of nothing but various sights around Ecruteak, or the setting sun, or an untouched expanse of freshly fallen snow just before dawn.

Felix settles in to snuggle up against Sylvain and hold him close while he looks over the pictures.

Felix blinks at that reaction. It's not what he expected. Sure, Sylvain's in no mood to laugh, but this seems strangely...melancholy? He suddenly remembers Dimitri's overreaction the last time he mentioned the dagger thing. ...something isn't right, here. He frowns, but doesn't ask--not yet. Now isn't the time. Right now, he needs to help Sylvain remember this life. This future. He'll find out what's going on later.

Felix looks up when Sylvain does, meeting his eyes for once. But he can't tell what it is Sylvain's looking for. Or looking at. "What?"

Then he smiles faintly. "Yes. Go ahead, you take it." Sylvain's arms are longer, and thus better for taking selfies--not that Felix would ever admit that. He stays right where he is--pressed close to Sylvain with arms wrapped around him, head resting on his shoulder, loose hair spilling across his chest--as he looks up into the camera.

Oh. Felix has looked at the photos before, of course, but he wasn't paying much attention to what sort of look he had on his face in them. This time, he can see what Sylvain means. "I was sad."

The faint smile is back again for the picture, though it's not a conscious effort. Just the knowledge that Sylvain wants a better memory to keep. Felix wants one, too. In fact, he wants more than one. He wants thousands of them. He wants to be able to fill a dozen of those books with pictures of them across a whole lifetime.

Once Sylvain is finished taking the photo, Felix reaches out to take his left hand and hold it, running his thumb over the ring that Sylvain wears. He wants to ask a question, but it doesn't come out as a question.

"Sylvain...after all this, you'd better still want to marry me."

He tries to keep his voice steady. He's not sure how well he succeeds.

Felix meets his eyes this time, seeking his answer there before Sylvain even speaks. If the answer is no, Felix...isn't sure what he'll do. Maybe nothing. Maybe he'll just...try to forget they ever got engaged in the first place. The thought feels vaguely like a death sentence, but...he's done such things before. Frozen his heart, built up walls. He can do it again if he must.

But then Sylvain's clasping his hand and saying 'of course' like there was no question in his mind, and Felix thinks he might be shaking a little with the force of his relief. Goddess, he's still a mess.

"Good." He almost says he wants to do it as soon as they can--forget the pageantry and just ask Dimitri to do a quick, private ceremony as their king and be done with it. Tomorrow, maybe. But he can practically hear Claude's voice telling him what a bad idea that is, that he shouldn't jump the gun out of fear, and he knows that little voice is right.

Besides, Sylvain deserves a chance to celebrate something unreservedly. (And Felix deserves a chance to see Sylvain dressed to the nines and looking more handsome than literally any other person on any planet. And, frankly, a chance to dress to the nines himself and blow Sylvain's mind.)

"As a birthday gift, Jinx gave me a book that holds pictures like this. She took some of my gym challenges to start it off, but I'm going to put these in there, too. And now that you're awake, I'll be taking a lot more." He snorts quietly. "Although I'll probably regret massaging your ego like that. You won't even need a mirror to look at yourself and preen."

Felix knows the situation is worse than he'd hoped when Sylvain doesn't even respond to his attempt to get them back onto solid ground with comfortable ribbing. When Felix is the one trying to lighten the mood, something is very wrong. His face falls into concern.

"Sylvain..." He doesn't protest at all at the hard squeeze. Instead, he brings his other hand over to clasp Sylvain's between both of his own. "While you were asleep, I thought the same thing. That when you woke up, we should do it right away. Claude reminded me that we shouldn't rush into something this important for the wrong reasons. He said we needed to do it in our own time, with hope for our future. Make it a happy moment. Which is a very Claude way of saying that we shouldn't let fear of what might happen rule us."

His thumbs stroke the back of Sylvain's hand gently, even while his expression grows determined--defiant, maybe. "If you really want to get married right away, then I will make that promise. As soon as we can. But Claude was right. We can't give in to fear and doubt, or they'll follow us for the rest of our lives. We need to..."

He looks up to meet Sylvain's eyes again, lifting one hand to cup his cheek with clear-eyed confidence. Felix doesn't know it, but he's rarely looked more like his father in his life than he does right now. "We need to live for what we believe in. I want you to be able to smile that day and mean it. All right?"

"Good."

But Felix isn't sure how much more of seeing Sylvain like this he can take. He'd thought that when his fiance woke up, things would be better. He'd thought, at the very least, that the uncertainty would end and he could put his feet back on the ground and feel normal again, feel...like himself again.

But Sylvain is unhappy and fearful, and so Felix is unhappy and fearful, and he hates both of those things. And it's pathetic that he had to rely on other people's words--Claude's, his old man's--just to get this far. It's good, at least, that Sylvain isn't trying to fool him into thinking he's fine, and it's good that he agreed to wait on the wedding until they can do it for the right reasons.

When will that be, though? Maybe never, if Felix can't figure out what to do to help Sylvain be happy again. Rodrigue helped Dimitri climb out of a deeper hole than this on his deathbed, why can't Felix figure out a single useful act that might do something? How sad is it that he has to draw on his father's last words that he didn't even hear to feel like he knows what he's doing?

The exhaustion of nine days of constant worry alongside getting woken up in the middle of the night are starting to catch up to him, if this useless circling of his thoughts is any indication. He takes advantage of his position to lean in and kiss Sylvain--this, at least, is one of the few ways he knows to express things he doesn't know how to say. Things like please bring your heart back from the war, too and I want to help you but I don't know how and I would slay a god to give genuine happiness back to you.

He doesn't really ever want to stop kissing Sylvain, but at some point he just runs out of energy. He lies back down and tugs the other man down with him, yawning. "I'm going back to sleep," he says, even though the idea of anyone sleeping at all right now seems fraught with danger. He's just so tired. More than anything, he wants Sylvain to hold him. He's spent too many nights just pretending; he wants it for real now.

"Stay with me. At least...for a while. Please?"