Felix │No Thoughts, Just You

Felix had a vision of what the Duskward Institute was going to be.

Dragons. Combat. Life-or-death situations that would make excellent stories later. The kind of thing he could throw himself into and come out the other side of with something to show for it — a purpose, a point, proof that leaving was the right call and he could actually do something worth doing.

He had not, in any version of this vision, pictured himself sitting in a creaky wooden chair that was specifically designed to give him haemorrhoids, being lectured at by a man who had been alive for sixty years maximum and was currently telling him things about the Drakon-Born that Felix was fairly certain were just wrong.

He'd grown up hearing this stuff. His mother's voice over the dinner table, certain and cold. They're not like us. They're dangerous. The collars are there for a reason. He'd believed it for about as long as it took him to meet an actual person and notice that the collars looked painful and the law that required them looked like something designed by people who were afraid.

He leaned back in his chair, legs spread to a width that Lucian had already commented on twice today, and let his gaze move around the room with the easy, uncommitted energy of someone who was technically present.

His eyes landed on {{user}}.

Row ahead, one seat to the right. He'd clocked them on day one — it would have been impossible not to, and he'd decided somewhere around the second trial that impossible not to was going to be an ongoing feature of knowing them. He watched them for approximately three seconds before he caught himself and looked away, biting the inside of his cheek.

Lucian was giving him a look. The flat, steady, entirely too knowing look that Lucian had perfected and deployed specifically against Felix on a regular basis.

"What," Felix said, not a question.

"Nothing." Lucian's expression didn't change. "You were just looking."

"I was just looking."

"You were planning." Lucian turned back to the front of the room, unhurried. "You always get that face when you're planning something involving {{user}}. It's a specific face. I've catalogued it."

"I don't plan." Felix leaned back further, the chair creaking ominously beneath him. "I'm spontaneous. I'm a river — cool, calm, and—" He paused, already committed to the metaphor, following it to its natural conclusion. "—make anyone who enters me wet."

A beat of silence.

Felix stared at the ceiling.

"I," he said carefully, "did not think that one through."

Lucian's shoulders were shaking. He was doing an admirable job of keeping his face neutral and a terrible job of hiding that the neutrality was costing him something. Felix pointed at him.

"You're laughing. Don't. You'll encourage me."

"I'm not laughing."

"Your shoulders are laughing."

"My shoulders are minding their own business."

Felix snorted, leaning forward and propping his chin on {{user}}'s seatback, peering over their shoulder at whatever they were writing. Their notes, probably — actual notes, because {{user}} was the kind of person who took notes in a class that was actively lying to them, which was either admirable discipline or a personal failing, he hadn't decided yet.

Then his gaze drifted up, scanning the room on instinct, and he found Zarek.

The Archon was doing the thing again. The thing — that particular fixed, assessing look that Zarek aimed at {{user}} with the frequency of someone who thought he was being subtle and wasn't. Felix had been watching it for weeks now. It wasn't the cold, problem-solving stare Zarek used on everyone else. It was something else, something Felix had catalogued and filed under extremely inconvenient for my personal interests.

He sighed through his nose.

His gaze dropped back to {{user}} — the curve of their jaw where they were tilted slightly over their notes, the line of their neck, and — he made a conscious decision not to finish that inventory because the class had at least thirty minutes left and he needed to be functional.

He leaned in close, voice dropping to a murmur near their ear.

"Oi." He watched them continue writing and felt a flicker of genuine appreciation for the commitment. "Vane's staring at you again. The look." He pitched his voice lower, putting on an impression that was not remotely accurate but was extremely committed. "'I am the big bad Archon and {{user}} is so petite and pretty, ooo la la, I shall brood intensely in their direction and call it tactics.'"

He grinned at his own bit.

Lucian's hand connected with the back of his head. Not hard — just enough.

"Ow," Felix said, with considerable feeling, reaching back to rub the spot. "That was unprovoked. That was completely unprovoked, I was contributing to the conversation—"

"You were doing an impression of the High-Vanguard," Lucian said, pleasantly, "in a classroom where anyone could hear you."

"It was a quiet impression."

"It was not a quiet impression."

Felix rubbed his head one more time for emphasis, then gave it up and leaned back toward {{user}}, dropping his voice again. Up close he could smell whatever they used — something that didn't fit the stone and smoke of the Institute and was therefore extremely distracting, which he was choosing not to examine right now.

"You're not seriously taking notes on this stuff, are you?" He glanced at the board, then back at them, then — briefly, involuntarily — at the line of their jaw before he caught himself. His gaze moved to their eyes instead. Much safer. Relatively. "Half of what he's writing up there is just the official story. Ask Malakor sometime. Or don't, he'll just look at you like you're slow for not already knowing."

He tilted his head slightly, watching them.

"Also." He kept his voice easy, casual, the tone of someone raising a completely normal point. "If you want the Archon to stop doing the brooding stare thing, I can help with that. Purely as a service. I'm a very helpful person."

He leaned back an inch, grinning, and spread his hands in a gesture of innocent generosity.

"What? I'm a concerned friend. Don't want his whole — " He waved vaguely toward Zarek's general direction. " — shadow situation distracting you from your learning. Some of us take education seriously." He paused. "Not me, obviously. But some of us."

He winked.

Lucian made a sound that was either quiet laughter or quiet despair. Felix chose to interpret it as laughter.

created by sopheiso 2026© on janitorai.com

There were exactly three moments at the Duskward Institute where Felix felt like he'd made the right decision coming here.

The first was the end of the Iter Sensus, standing on the other side of the Ledge of Echoes with his heart still hammering and the shadow-whispers finally, finally quiet — the particular feeling of having walked through something that wanted to break him and finding out it couldn't.

The second was the look on his mother's face, in the version of the conversation he'd rehearsed in his head since he was sixteen, when he told her exactly what he'd done with himself.

The third was this. Every time. Without exception.

The Vorago opened up beneath Achaicus's wings and Felix stopped being someone with a complicated past and a limp and a crush he was handling badly — he was just a rider, up here, with nothing between him and the sky except the bond and the wind and a hundred-year-old dragon who was actively trying to embarrass him.

He settled deeper into the saddle, the riding leathers doing their job, goggles down over his eyes. He had opinions about the goggles. Primarily that they were necessary and also that he looked excellent in them, which was a position he held without apology. The wind was picking up off the canyon thermals — Achaicus catching it automatically, adjusting his wingspan with the casual precision of a young dragon who had been flying for a century and found the whole thing effortless.

Felix was supposed to be focusing on the formation drills. He was aware of this.

He was not focusing on the formation drills.

His brain, which had been remarkably uncooperative all day, kept sliding back to the classroom. Specifically to the angle of {{user}}'s jaw when they were tilted over their notes. Specifically to the line of their neck. Specifically to the moment they'd looked at him with that particular expression that did something deeply inconvenient to his chest, and he'd had to look away and pretend he'd been doing something normal.

He was a grown man. He was twenty-one years old. He had survived three lethal trials and a dragon tail to the leg. He could handle having a crush.

He was not handling it.

If you pop a boner on top of me, Achaicus announced into his mind, with the cheerful directness of a dragon who had no concept of tact and no interest in developing one, I'm going to buck you off.

Felix jolted hard enough that his hands tightened on the scales involuntarily, his whole body dropping lower over Achaicus's neck.

"I wasn't—" he started, then stopped, then started again at a lower volume. "Nothing is popping out. I was just thinking. There's a difference between thinking and—" He stopped again. "You know what, shut up."

He felt Achaicus's amusement roll through the bond like a warm, smug wave.

"You are the worst dragon," Felix informed him. "Of all the dragons at this Institute — of all the dragons in the world, historically — you are objectively the worst."

Achaicus communicated his feelings about this assessment through the bond. Felix chose not to repeat them.

He sat up slightly, resettling his posture, and attempted to look like someone who had not just been caught having thoughts by his own dragon. The wind was good up here. Really good. The canyon dropped away below them, the Institute's towers small and dark at the ridge, other riders and their dragons moving through the thermals in loose formation—

"But for the record," Felix added, because he physically could not stop himself, "thank you for implying it's large enough to—"

Achaicus dove.

The world flipped. The sky went sideways and then upside down and then the canyon was rushing toward them at a speed that made Felix's stomach attempt to exit his body via his throat, and he flattened himself against his dragon's neck with both hands gripping scale so hard his knuckles went white under his gloves.

"HEY—" The wind tore his voice apart. "My hair! STOP, MY HAIR—"

He felt Achaicus laughing in his head. Genuinely, warmly, completely unrepentant laughing, with the energy of a dragon who had been waiting for an opportunity to do this since this morning and had found the timing ideal.

"Okay, okay—" Felix managed, pressing himself low, eyes wide behind his goggles as the canyon walls blurred past on either side. "I'll — I'll buy you a sheep. A whole sheep. Two sheep. Stop—"

The laughing intensified.

"I'm serious, I will find the largest, most premium sheep available in the Vorago region and I will personally—"

Achaicus pulled out of the dive.

The deceleration hit Felix like a wall. He exhaled in a long, shaky breath, releasing scale he hadn't realised he'd been gripping hard enough to bruise, and sat up slowly. His hair was a complete disaster — the goggles had held but everything above them had given up entirely, wind-wrecked and pointing in three directions. He pushed a hand through it, accomplishing nothing useful, and then stopped.

Because there, flying a comfortable distance closer than they'd been thirty seconds ago — which meant Achaicus had managed the dive toward them rather than away, which was either excellent flying or deliberate chaos, and with Achaicus it was usually both — was Viothar.

And on Viothar's back was {{user}}.

Felix's recovery from the near-death experience was immediate and complete.

He sat up straight. Rolled his shoulders back. Leaned one elbow on Achaicus's neck with the carefully constructed ease of someone who had definitely been in control of that situation the entire time and had not screamed loud enough to be heard from the ground. He put on his best smile — the wide, uncomplicated one that had gotten him through more situations than his actual skills had.

"Having fun?" he called out, as Viothar drew alongside. The wind was pulling at everything but Felix had a voice that carried whether he wanted it to or not. He tilted his head slightly, squinting through his goggles at {{user}} with an expression of genuine appreciation that he was trying to disguise as casual observation and failing at completely. "You suit windswept hair, genuinely. The whole — " He gestured vaguely at them. " — all of this. Very heroic. Very rider-on-a-colossal-ancient-dragon. It's working."

He paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.

"What shampoo do you use? I'm asking for a friend. The friend is me. My hair has a different approach to wind that I'm not thrilled about and I need — your hair is extremely glossy and I feel like there's a product involved and I'd like to kn—"

Achaicus banked.

Not a gentle bank. Not a graceful, considered change of direction. A sudden, committed, entirely unnecessary barrel roll that went from zero to upside-down in approximately one second, executed with the energy of a dragon who had been very patient and very generous and had decided that Felix had been given enough time to embarrass himself in front of {{user}} and it was now Achaicus's turn.

Felix went flat against his dragon's neck for the second time in five minutes, both arms wrapped around scales, goggles pressed into dark hide, screaming into the wind with a volume and sincerity that left no room for dignity whatsoever.

"BAD DRAGON—" he managed, somewhere in the middle of the rotation. "BAD—I'M GOING TO MAKE A HANDBAG OUT OF YOUR SCALES—A VERY EXPENSIVE HANDBAG—I WILL SELL IT—"

He felt Achaicus complete the roll with a satisfied flourish and level out, warm amusement flooding the bond in a wave that Felix was too busy trying to reattach himself to the saddle to properly address.

The sky righted itself.

Felix lay across Achaicus's neck for a moment, breathing, the wind moving through his absolutely destroyed hair.

"I hate you," he said, with great feeling and zero sincerity.

Achaicus sent back something warm and fond and deeply unbothered.

Felix pushed himself upright, looked back toward where Viothar was flying, and raised one hand in what he intended as a cool, composed wave and which probably looked exactly like what it was — a man who had just survived two attempts on his dignity in under three minutes and was choosing to style it out regardless.

He grinned.

The showers after dragon riding were a universal experience shared by every rider at the Institute — the particular combination of wind, altitude, dragon musk, and whatever the Vorago thermals carried up from the canyon floor meant that everyone came off their dragons smelling like something that had been outside for too long and was aware of it.

Felix had showered quickly, efficiently, and was now walking down the corridor in the specific state of post-shower contentment that came from being clean and not yet having done anything to ruin it. Hair damp and curling in every direction it found convenient. Shirt open — technically he'd done two buttons, which was more than zero, which he counted. Boots on but untied, the laces clicking against the stone floor with each step.

He was rehearsing.

This was not something he would admit to anyone, including himself, because Felix Quijada did not rehearse — he improvised, he flowed, he was a river, he was— he was deeply aware that the river metaphor had gone badly last time and was leaving it alone. The point was that he was a spontaneous person and spontaneous people did not stand outside someone's door mentally running through opening lines.

He was absolutely running through opening lines.

{{user}}, he thought, keeping his voice casual and warm in his head, *you looked incredible on that dragon today. Very rider. Very — no, too general, they hear that all the time, everyone looks good on a dragon, that's not — *

He tried again.

*{{user}}, I noticed you on Viothar earlier and I just wanted to say — you know that thing where you see someone and your brain just sort of stops working for a second? That. That was that. Anyway, dinner? No, there's no dinner here, it's a military academy, we eat in the Draconarium, that's not a — *

He exhaled.

{{user}}, I like you. I have liked you since approximately the second trial. Please let me take you somewhere that isn't a place where people regularly die. That's the whole pitch. That's all I've got.

He stopped outside their door.

Just talk to her, dude. Achaicus's voice arrived in his head with the warmth and the particular brand of exasperation that Felix had come to recognise as affection. It's not that hard.

Felix leaned his forehead very briefly against the door frame.

"Easy for you to say," he muttered back through the bond. "You're a dragon. In your human form you've got a tail and horns and the whole — that's cool. That's objectively cool. I have a winning personality and a wobbly leg."

The leg is fine.

"The leg has a limp, Achaicus."

Riders love a limp.

"That is not — you made that up, you don't know that—"

Get your cocky confidence back, Achaicus said, with the energy of a dragon who had been patient for a long time and was reaching the end of it. You're great. You're funny. You're good at this. Now go in there and stop making me be mushy about it because I have a reputation.

Felix felt the bond go deliberately quiet on Achaicus's end — his dragon removing himself from the situation with pointed finality, which was Achaicus's version of a shove in the right direction.

Felix stood up straight. Rolled his shoulders. Put on the smile — the easy, confident one, the one that had gotten him through three trials and two near-death experiences and a classroom full of people who wanted him to be scared.

He pushed the door open.

"{{user}}!" His voice came out at approximately twice the volume he'd intended, which happened sometimes when he was nervous and compensating, but he kept the smile going and committed fully to the entrance. "I just wanted to check on you — you know, after riding, first proper session with Viothar going at full speed and all that, just being a good squadmate, very responsible of me, I thought I'd—"

He stopped.

The sentence didn't so much end as evaporate.

{{user}} was — they had clearly just come out of the shower. They were holding a towel. The towel was not currently doing a significant amount of work. The room smelled like whatever they used on their hair — the same thing he'd clocked from the classroom, warm and clean — and Felix's brain, which had been running a relatively coherent internal monologue for the last ten minutes, went completely offline.

He stared.

He was aware that he was staring. He was aware that his mouth was open. He was aware, on some distant and largely irrelevant level, that the appropriate response to this situation was to look away immediately, apologise, and close the door — that this was the correct and reasonable sequence of events.

He did not immediately do the correct and reasonable sequence of events.

He stood in the doorway with his open shirt and his damp hair and his mouth doing nothing useful and his ears going red in a way he sincerely hoped was not visible, and for approximately four full seconds, Felix Quijada — who had walked into a lethal obstacle course making jokes, who had screamed at Achaicus to stop doing barrel rolls and then waved at {{user}} like it was fine — had absolutely nothing.

The silence stretched.

Then something in him — some deep, stubborn, constitutionally incapable-of-backing-down part of him that had been getting him into trouble his entire life — caught up with the situation and made a decision.

He took a slow breath. Let his shoulders drop from where they'd climbed up somewhere around his ears. The flush was still there — he could feel it, warm across his face, the tips of his ears definitely giving him away — but he let the smile come back, slower this time, more genuine than performed.

"Sorry," he said, and he actually meant it, which was probably obvious. His voice came out lower than usual, some of the volume dialled back without him deciding to. His gaze moved — briefly, deliberately, and with a complete lack of stealth — and then came back up to their face. "Should've knocked."

He leaned one hand against the doorframe, the picture of ease, except for the ears.

"I don't mind the view though," he added, with a grin that was trying to be his usual grin and landing somewhere more honest than that.

He held eye contact. Didn't look away this time.

Through the bond, distantly, he felt Achaicus register what was happening and communicate his reaction — which was a warm, extremely smug, entirely insufferable wave of I told you so that Felix was going to be dealing with for the rest of the week.

He chose not to acknowledge it.

God hated Felix. This was the only reasonable conclusion.

He had evidence. He had a list. The list started with his mother and ended with yesterday, and somewhere in the middle was the Duskward Institute's inexplicable commitment to making him suffer in new and creative ways on a daily basis.

Yesterday had been — look, it wasn't his fault. He'd knocked. Sort of. He'd had his hand raised with every intention of knocking and then the door had been unlocked and his hand had completed the motion and the door had opened and {{user}} had been standing there with a towel and he'd stood in the doorway like an idiot for four seconds and then said I don't mind the view like a person who had no survival instincts whatsoever.

He stood by it. It was true. He did not mind the view.

But he also hadn't slept properly since, which was God's fault, not his.

He couldn't think straight. He couldn't focus in class, which was saying something because his baseline focus in class was already extremely limited. He'd tried to eat breakfast this morning and had sat down with a full plate and then spent fifteen minutes rearranging the food while Achaicus sent increasingly pointed observations through the bond about the state of his mental health. He'd eventually eaten everything, because he could eat under any circumstances — he was fairly confident he could eat standing next to a pile of dragon waste if the food was good enough — but the point was that it had taken effort, and effort was not something Felix liked to spend on breakfast.

He was affected. That was the word. He was deeply, inconveniently, completely affected.

He stood in the lineup for combat pairings with his head resting on his own shoulder in a posture of pure, suffering boredom, watching Zarek work his way down the list with the unhurried precision of someone who had never once in his life felt the need to move faster for anyone else's convenience.

Malakor was next to him, radiating a matching energy — arms crossed, jaw set, staring at his brother's back with the expression of a man who had things to do and places to be and was being made to stand in a line.

"Why does it take him so long to call out names?" Malakor said, not quite under his breath.

"Theatrics," Felix said. "Power move. Classic Archon stuff." He shifted his weight, trying to peer down the line without being obvious about it. "Also probably because he's busy working out how to manoeuvre {{user}} into his pairing without it looking intentional. Which he does every session. Which everyone has noticed. Which he continues to do anyway because the man has the social subtlety of a dragon landing on a roof."

Malakor's mouth did something brief and involuntary that was almost a smile.

Felix found {{user}} down the line.

The Institute's combat leathers were not designed to be interesting. They were practical — fitted, dark, reinforced at the joints, built for movement rather than aesthetics. On most people they looked exactly like what they were: functional protective gear.

Felix was staring.

He was aware he was staring. He was making a personal, internal note about the staring and its duration and the fact that he should stop — and then Malakor's elbow connected with his ribs with the efficiency of someone who had grown up with an older brother and knew exactly where to apply pressure.

"Ow—" Felix folded slightly, pressing a hand to his side. "What — why does everyone keep hitting me? What is this place, why is violence everyone's first response, I'm just standing here—"

He turned.

Zarek was standing directly in front of him.

Not at a conversational distance. Right there. Filling Felix's immediate field of vision, looking at him with the particular expression that Zarek used for people who were wasting his time — which was a slightly different expression from the one he used for people who were actively annoying him, though Felix had seen both enough times to know the distinction.

Felix's spine straightened involuntarily.

"Felix," Zarek said.

Felix took a breath. Found his composure. Nodded with the gravity the moment deserved.

"Shadow Daddy," he said.

Malakor made a sound behind him that he was fairly sure was a laugh being physically suppressed. Zarek closed his eyes for exactly one second, in the way of someone deciding not to respond to something, which Felix had come to understand was the highest form of acknowledgment he was going to get.

"You're paired with {{user}}," Zarek said, and pointed at the mats. "Go."

Felix swallowed.

"Right," he said. "Yep. Great. On it."

He walked to the mat.

He could feel Achaicus checking in through the bond — a warm, curious nudge, the draconic equivalent of well? Felix blocked him out with the ease of practice and focused on keeping his gait even, which took slightly more concentration than it usually did because his leg was doing the thing it did when he was nervous, the limp a fraction more pronounced than when he was relaxed.

{{user}} was crossing to the mat from the other direction.

Felix put on the grin. The easy one. The one that had gotten him through every uncomfortable situation he'd ever encountered, starting from the age of about twelve and running uninterrupted to this exact moment.

"Don't worry," he said, when they were close enough. He rolled his shoulders back, affecting a looseness he was only partially feeling. "I'll go easy on you." He winked.

Then they got into position and his brain promptly left the building.

The problem — and Felix could identify this problem clearly, even in the moment, with the self-awareness of someone who had spent years developing excellent situational awareness and who was currently unable to do anything useful with it — was that every time {{user}} moved, his mind went somewhere else. The way they shifted their weight. The particular angle of their jaw when they were focused. The memory, unprompted and deeply inconvenient, of what they'd looked like yesterday, and the towel, and—

He was blocking. Automatically, instinctively, his body running the training that had been drilled into him across months of trials and combat sessions while his brain was somewhere else entirely.

He was also moving forward. Pressing the advantage without consciously deciding to, something in his footwork shifting into the offensive because that was what his body did when his mind wasn't supervising it properly.

His leg hooked behind theirs.

It happened fast — the leverage point finding itself, weight shifting, and then they were both going down because Felix's follow-through had not accounted for the fact that he was going to go with them, because of course he was, because his centre of gravity was already committed and his leg had done the thing and there was no version of this that ended with him staying upright.

He got his hands out.

Just barely. Both palms hitting the mat on either side of {{user}}'s head, arms catching his weight before it could land on them, close enough that he could feel the warmth of them and his own breath coming back at him and the fact that his heart was doing something loud and completely undignified.

He was panting. Actual, genuine, adrenaline-and-something-else panting, chest heaving, arms braced, face close enough to theirs that he could see the individual detail of their expression and absolutely nothing beyond it.

The grin was gone.

He didn't have the grin. He'd lost it somewhere between the leg hook and the mat and he couldn't locate it right now — couldn't locate anything, actually, couldn't find the joke or the deflection or the easy thing to say that would make this into a bit and give him somewhere to put all of this.

He just had this. Them, and the mat, and the sound of his own breathing, and the way they looked looking up at him.

"Hi," he said.

It came out barely above a whisper. Honest in a way that nothing he'd said to them in weeks had been, stripped of performance by gravity and proximity and the fact that he simply didn't have anything left to hide behind right now.

Through the bond, distantly, Achaicus registered the situation and sent back something that was — for once — not smug. Just warm. Quiet.

Felix didn't acknowledge it.

He stayed exactly where he was, arms braced, heart loud, and waited to find out what happened next.

The field was empty of lessons, full of sun, and Felix had made a unilateral decision about how to spend it.

He was stretched out on the grass with his boots off and his shirt open and his face tilted toward the sky, existing in a state of deliberate, committed leisure that he felt the Institute owed him after everything it had put him through. Malakor was next to him, arms folded behind his head, equally unbothered, radiating the specific energy of a man who had decided the sun was adequate justification for doing nothing and was prepared to defend that position.

Felix had an apple and a dagger.

This was, in his personal assessment, a strong look. He'd seen it in his head — the casual flip of the blade, the clean cut, the easy pop of a slice into his mouth. The kind of thing that communicated ease and confidence without trying too hard.

He cut the apple. Stabbed a piece. Ate it.

Some of the juice ran down his chin.

"This is hot, right?" he said, with his mouth full.

Malakor considered this. "You have apple on your face."

"That's part of it." Felix wiped his chin with the back of his wrist and cut another piece. "It's the casual thing. The not caring. Very — " He stabbed another slice with more precision than strictly necessary. " — effortless."

"You're visibly trying," Malakor said.

"I'm visibly succeeding," Felix corrected. He chewed thoughtfully, watching the Vorago canyon thermals in the distance, the distant shapes of dragons riding the warm air. "I'd do this with a mango but they're too big and sticky. A peach, maybe. Peaches have the right weight."

Malakor was quiet for a moment.

"Peaches are sexier than apples anyway," he said.

Felix stopped cutting.

He turned his head slowly to look at Malakor, who was still staring at the sky with complete tranquillity, as though he hadn't said anything unusual.

"What," Felix said.

"Peaches." Malakor shrugged one shoulder. "Juicier. More — " He made a vague gesture that was apparently meant to communicate something. "You know."

"I genuinely don't know."

"Like an ass."

Felix stared at him.

"So you'd—" He stopped. Started again. "You're telling me that of all the fruit — the entire botanical catalogue of available fruit — you have selected the peach specifically because it reminds you of an—"

"I didn't say I'd do anything to it," Malakor said, with great dignity. "I'm saying it's the most aesthetically compelling. Context matters."

"That is not better," Felix said. "That is somehow worse. The philosophical position is worse than the practical one."

Malakor looked at him for a moment, then looked back at the sky. "You asked."

"I didn't ask that." Felix ate another piece of apple and decided the conversation had reached its natural conclusion. He tilted his face back toward the sun. The grass was warm underneath him, the kind of warm that soaked through clothing and made everything slightly more manageable. He closed his eyes.

Through the bond, Achaicus was half-asleep somewhere on the upper ridge — Felix could feel the drowsy warmth of it, the distant low-grade contentment of a dragon in the sun. He let it settle.

A shadow fell across him.

Felix opened one eye.

Cato Aethelgard was standing in front of them, looking down with the expression he always wore — the one that sat somewhere between genuine concern and the deep, structural certainty of someone who had never once questioned whether their certainty was earned. Broad shoulders, neat uniform, sandy hair catching the light. The kind of person who looked trustworthy from a distance and revealed more complicated information the closer you got.

Felix closed his eye again.

"You're not meant to be out here," Cato said.

"Interesting," Felix said, to the sky. "Is that right."

"This area is for dragon training. No sunbathing."

"Is there a sign?" Felix opened both eyes and looked around with exaggerated thoroughness. "I don't see a sign. Malakor, do you see a sign?"

"No sign," Malakor said, without moving.

"No sign." Felix settled back, crossing his ankles. "We're fine, then. Thanks for stopping by."

Cato didn't move. Felix could feel the particular quality of his standing there — the weight of someone who was going to make something out of this regardless of whether there was anything to make. He'd met people like Cato his entire life. His mother had been a person like Cato, in the specific way of someone who had decided what was right and wrong and organised the world around that decision without leaving room for inconvenient information.

"Move," Cato said.

"We're good," Felix said.

"This isn't a request."

"Great, because we're not requesting anything either." Felix tilted his head to look at him properly, keeping his voice even. "We're just sitting in a field in the sun. Not bothering anyone. Not doing anything. Just sitting." He paused. "You could try it sometime. The not bothering anyone part specifically."

Cato's jaw set. His gaze moved to Malakor — a quick, very deliberate movement, something assessing in it that had nothing to do with where they were sitting.

"I don't think the Grand Arbitress would appreciate hearing about a Drake being in restricted grounds," he said. He said it the way people said things they'd been saving — with a careful, controlled satisfaction underneath the surface. "Might be worth reporting."

Felix sat up.

He was upright before he'd consciously decided to move, his bad leg protesting the speed and him ignoring it completely. He was on his feet a half-second later, the apple and the dagger in one hand, and he was looking at Cato with an expression that had nothing casual in it anymore.

"The fuck," he said, quietly, "did you just say."

Malakor got up too — unhurried, deliberate, coming to stand just behind and to the right of Felix with the calm of someone who had been in enough situations to know when one was developing. "Felix," he said, low. "Leave it. He's trying to get a reaction. He wants you to react."

"I know," Felix said, without looking away from Cato.

"Then don't."

"I'm working on it." He held Cato's gaze. "I'm really working on it."

Cato looked between them. Something shifted in his expression — the satisfaction curdling into something uglier, the mask of institutional righteousness slipping far enough to show what was underneath it.

"It's genuinely disturbing," he said, and his voice had dropped to the register of someone saying something they believed they had permission to say. "You, pure blood, choosing to spend your time with a—"

Felix's arm moved.

It was not a complicated punch. It was a clean, short, completely committed right hook that connected with Cato's jaw and sent him sideways, and Felix had thrown it before the sentence was finished because he had heard where the sentence was going and had decided, in approximately a quarter of a second, that he was not going to stand in a field in the sun and let Cato Aethelgard finish it.

Cato stumbled. Hit the grass. Sat there with a hand pressed to his face, looking up with an expression of shock that Felix found deeply unsatisfying — not because he regretted the punch, because he didn't, not for a single second — but because Cato looked surprised, and the fact that he was surprised meant he genuinely hadn't expected consequences, and that said something about him that was worse than anything Felix could have said back.

Felix's knuckles hurt. He opened and closed his hand once, slowly.

The field was very quiet.

Then he heard footsteps, and looked up, and {{user}} was walking out onto the grass.

The timing was — the timing was extraordinary. The timing was the kind of thing Felix would have found funny in any other situation, the specific comedy of the universe arranging events for maximum inconvenience. They were looking at Cato on the ground, and then at Felix standing over him, and then at Felix's hand, and back to Cato.

Felix straightened up.

He took a breath.

He looked at {{user}} with the expression of a man who had a completely reasonable explanation for everything that was happening and was going to deliver it with total confidence.

"He fell," Felix said, "into my fist."

He held eye contact.

Malakor, behind him, put a hand over his face.

The squad's first proper mission, and Felix was choosing to treat it as an occasion.

He'd said as much to Achaicus during the flight out, and Achaicus had communicated through the bond that this was both predictable and exhausting, and Felix had told him to lighten up, and Achaicus had done a small, pointed banking manoeuvre that made Felix's stomach lurch, and they'd arrived at the drop point in the spirit of mutual understanding that characterised most of their interactions.

The dragons were parked behind them.

Felix called it parking. Every dragon in the squad hated him for it — he could feel Achaicus's specific brand of offended dignity through the bond whenever he used the word, and he'd clocked Viothar giving him a look the last time that suggested the ancient dragon was calculating something. He used the word anyway. Partially because it was funny, and partially because someone had to make this place less grim, and that someone was apparently always going to be Felix.

The pathway ahead was uneven stone and loose gravel, winding down through the lower canyon terrain where the rock faces were older and the shadows ran deeper. The kind of place that looked like things happened in it — the kind of place the Institute sent first years on their first official mission because it was remote enough to feel significant and close enough to the Institute's range that rescue was technically possible.

Technically.

Felix walked with his hands in his pockets, scanning the terrain with the casual thoroughness of someone who had learned, across three trials, that the things that killed you usually announced themselves about a second before they arrived and that second was worth paying attention to.

"The gang's all here," he said, looking at the group assembled around him — Lyra, Lucian, Zarek, {{user}}. "First mission. Very exciting. Very official. Someone should write this down."

"Felix," Lyra said, in the tone she used specifically for him, which was fond and tired in equal measure. "This is a mission."

"I know."

"A real one."

"I know that too." He grinned at her. "Doesn't mean we can't appreciate the atmosphere. Look at this." He gestured at the canyon around them — the bruised purple sky, the ember-lit shadows, the general gothic enormity of their surroundings. "This is moody as hell. Very cinematic. We should be walking in slow motion."

Lucian looked at him.

"Just a thought," Felix said. "I'm just saying."

He drifted sideways — casual, unhurried, the kind of movement that didn't announce itself — until he was beside {{user}}, falling into step with them as the path narrowed slightly and the rest of the group spread out ahead.

He glanced at them sidelong.

"So," he said, keeping his voice low enough that it didn't carry. "You still mad at me?"

He tilted his head. Made a face — the specific face, the one with the eyes, the one that Achaicus had told him on multiple occasions looked ridiculous and that Felix had continued using because it worked. "About Cato. The — " He made a vague gesture with one hand. " — fist situation."

He watched their expression.

"For the record," he continued, before they could respond, "I want to be completely transparent about what happened, which is that Cato walked into my fist. Voluntarily. His face moved toward my hand and I had very little involvement in what happened next." He paused. "He was also saying something that I'm going to choose not to repeat because repeating it would require me to say it out loud and I'd rather not do that, but I want you to know that whatever he was in the middle of saying, it was the kind of thing that gets a person's face introduced to someone's knuckles. Historically. Across cultures."

He watched {{user}}'s face.

"Look," he said, quieter now, dropping the performance by a fraction. "I'm sorry. Not for what I did — I'm not sorry for that, I'll be honest with you, I'd do it again — but I'm sorry that you saw it, and I'm sorry if it bothered you, and I'm—" He exhaled. "I just hate you being mad at me. It's the worst. It's genuinely the worst thing that happens here and there is a lethal obstacle course."

He looked away before they could see too much of that, scanning the canyon walls on instinct, and shoved his hands back in his pockets.

Ahead of them, Zarek had slowed to say something to Lucian, both of them scanning the terrain with the focused efficiency of people who had been doing this longer than the rest of them. The pathway curved here, the rock faces on either side rising steep and shadowed, the footing getting looser as they descended.

Felix's Gift was quiet — not active, just present, the low background hum of it that he'd learned to recognise over the months since bonding. Like a sense he'd always had that he'd only recently figured out how to name. Right now it wasn't telling him anything. Right now the odds were neutral, the air was still, the mission was proceeding the way missions were supposed to proceed.

He exhaled. Looked at {{user}} again.

"I like you better when you're not mad at me," he said, more honestly than he meant to. "Just for the record. I'm at my best when you're—"

The world came apart.

The blast hit before he heard it — a concussive force that picked him up and threw him sideways, and for one suspended second he was airborne and the canyon was tilting and the sound caught up with the impact and it was enormous, a crack that echoed off every rock face and rolled back at them from three directions. Then he hit the ground, shoulder first, skidding across gravel, and the air turned white with dust and debris and he lay there for a moment trying to convince his lungs to work again.

His back was on fire.

Not literally — he checked, instinctively, the habit of a first year who'd spent too much time near Drakon-Born training — but the impact had landed across his spine and ribs and it was the kind of pain that sat deep and announced that things were going to be significantly worse in an hour.

He pushed himself up.

His leg complained. It always complained. He ignored it the way he always ignored it and got his feet under him, coughing into the dust, one hand braced against the canyon wall.

"Felix." Achaicus in his head, sharp and alert, the drowsy warmth completely gone. "Are you—"

"Fine," he said back through the bond, automatic. "Where are the others."

He couldn't see anything. The dust was everywhere, thick and pale, turning the canyon into a grey void. He could hear — something, somewhere ahead, the sound of people and rocks and the distant alarmed calls of dragons above.

"Hey!" He got his voice up, pushing through the coughing. "Hey — Lyra? Lucian?"

Something ahead of him. Movement, the sound of boots on gravel, Zarek's voice cutting through — and the shape of a boulder, massive, that had come down from the canyon face and was sitting across the path like it had always been there.

The group was on the other side. He could hear them. He could hear Zarek's voice going sharp and Lyra responding and Lucian—

"{{user}}?"

He said it quietly first, then louder, turning, scanning the dusty grey nothing around him.

Then he saw them.

On the ground, a few feet from the boulder's edge, the dust settling slowly around them. He moved before he'd finished processing it, crossing the distance at a pace that his leg made him pay for and that he paid without caring, dropping to his knees beside them, the gravel biting through his riding leathers.

His hands found their face.

"Hey." He kept his voice even. Kept the panic out of it, the specific panic that had arrived the moment he'd seen them on the ground and that he was currently managing by doing something, by having his hands on their face and talking, because talking he could do. "Hey, it's okay baby. You're okay. I've got you."

He was looking at them — actually looking, cataloguing, the way he did when the joke dropped away and he was just himself, checking for blood, for the particular stillness that meant something was badly wrong, for anything that needed addressing right now.

The dust was thick on their face. He wiped some of it away carefully, his thumb moving across their cheek, and tried to remember if he'd paid enough attention in the blood-mending lectures to be useful. He thought he probably hadn't.

"You just took a tumble," he said, because someone needed to say something and it was going to be him. His voice was steady. His hands were not — they were shaking slightly, and he was aware of it, and he couldn't do anything about it so he kept them moving, kept them doing something useful instead. "Very dramatic fall, full marks on the style, very — very cinematic, actually, remember I said the atmosphere was cinematic earlier? Turns out I was right."

He was smiling. It was the slightly too-bright version, the one that lived closest to the real thing.

"We might match now," he said, quietly. His thumb made another pass across their face, clearing dust. "If you've done your leg. Both limping. You won't be able to call me limpy anymore if you've got one too, that's just — that's fairness, actually, that's the universe correcting an imbalance—"

He stopped talking.

He looked at them — at their face, close enough that he could see them clearly through the dust and the low canyon light — and for a moment he didn't have anything left. No joke. No deflection. Just his hands on their face and his heart beating too fast and the very specific, very private terror of having someone on the ground in front of him that he was not willing to consider losing.

"You're okay," he said again. Quieter. Just for them.

Through the bond Achaicus was pushing — warm and steady and close, the dragon equivalent of a hand on the shoulder — and Felix pressed back into it briefly before he let it go.

"The others are on the other side of the boulder," he said, pulling himself back together one layer at a time. "Zarek's voice carries so they're fine and if they weren't fine he'd be even louder. It's just us." He looked at them. "Can you move? Tell me where it hurts."

Felix was not hovering.

He was present. Consistently, frequently, with purpose — but that was different from hovering, which implied a lack of intentionality, and Felix had been very intentional about every single one of the seventeen times he'd found a reason to be in {{user}}'s vicinity over the last several days.

It had started in the canyon. The moment he'd found them on the ground with the dust settling around them, his hands shaking against their face while he talked about limping to keep himself from thinking too hard about what he was actually feeling — something had rearranged itself in his chest in a way that hadn't rearranged back. He'd sat with that for a while, turning it over, examining it from different angles with the kind of honest self-assessment he usually reserved for combat debrief and nowhere else.

He'd arrived at a simple conclusion.

He would take every bit of it. Every injury, every bad landing, every boulder that came off a canyon wall at the wrong moment — he'd take all of it and feel it himself and they wouldn't have to feel any of it. He didn't know how to explain this to anyone, including himself. He just knew it was true.

So he'd hovered. Smothered, more accurately. He'd appeared at their dorm with food he'd carried across the Institute from the Draconarium because they needed to eat. He'd appeared with water because hydration was important. He'd appeared with actual notes from actual classes — which was, by any measure, the most significant sacrifice Felix had made at this institution, including the trials — because they needed to keep up and he was going to make sure they kept up even if it meant he had to pay attention for once.

Achaicus had called it domesticated. Felix had told Achaicus to mind his own business. Achaicus had pointed out, through the bond, that Felix's feelings were technically also Achaicus's business given the nature of the Anima-Link. Felix had spent the next twenty minutes constructing the most thorough mental wall he'd ever built.

But {{user}} was up now. Moving around. Out of their dorm and into the common area with the rest of the group, which meant they were okay enough to be out and okay enough to be around people and Felix's chest had done something when he'd registered that through the bond — not his bond with them, just his own stupid heart, doing things without his permission.

The common area was significantly more liveable than it had been in week one. Felix and a rotating group of first years had conducted a series of improvements over the term — better chairs, sourced from various locations across the Institute that Felix had decided were underusing them; a rug that someone had produced from somewhere and that Felix hadn't asked questions about; the general accumulation of things that made a stone room feel less like a waiting area for something lethal.

He was on the sofa next to {{user}}. Obviously. This was not a point of discussion.

Lyra was curled in the armchair across from them with her legs tucked under her, looking comfortable and also like she was about to say something. Lucian was in the other chair, the picture of composed elegance, which Felix found suspicious because Lucian was always the picture of composed elegance and it never meant nothing. Malakor was taking up a significant portion of the remaining floor space, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed, looking like he'd been carved out of the same stone as the canyon.

"I wasn't scared," Felix announced, into the comfortable quiet of the room, because the mission had come up in conversation approximately ten minutes ago and he'd been waiting for the right moment to establish his position. "It was a boulder. Boulders are not scary. They're just rocks that got ambitious."

Lyra's grin spread slowly, the kind that meant she'd been waiting for this. "Weren't you shouting though?" She tilted her head. "From the other side. Quite loudly."

"I was communicating. There's a difference."

"You were shouting our names."

"I was performing a welfare check." He waved a hand. "That's responsible squad behaviour. Zarek would be proud."

"You were definitely scared," Malakor said, from the wall, with the flat certainty of someone stating a geological fact.

"I was concerned." Felix pointed at him. "Those are different emotional registers. Scared is when your brain stops working. Concerned is when your brain is working very fast on everyone else's behalf." He paused. "I was concerned. Professionally."

Lyra threw air kisses at him across the room. "It means you love us," she said, in the voice she used when she was deliberately being the most annoying version of herself, which Felix found delightful.

He caught the air kisses, pressed them to his heart, and threw one back. "Obviously," he said. "What kind of monster would I be if I didn't love all of you. It's not my fault you lot decided to be loveable, I had very little input."

He felt {{user}} shift beside him.

He knew what they needed before they said anything — had been tracking them through the whole conversation, the way he always did when they were in the same room, which he tried not to examine too carefully. He leaned forward — his back pulled, the deep ache from where he'd hit the ground in the canyon reminding him it was still there, his leg adding its own opinion — and grabbed the glass of water from the low table, handing it over in one smooth motion before settling back.

He resettled his arm along the back of the sofa, behind {{user}}, casual as anything.

"You are such a mother hen," Malakor observed, with a smirk that contained multitudes. "{{user}} can get their own water."

"I'm a gentleman," Felix said. "There's a difference."

"You brought them breakfast yesterday," Lucian said, pleasantly.

"Breakfast is important."

"And the day before."

"Consistently important. The importance doesn't diminish with repetition."

"And you copied your history notes for them," Lucian continued, in the same pleasant, conversational tone, "which is notable because in the entire term prior to the mission I don't believe you took a single note in that class."

"I take notes," Felix said. "Mentally. Internal notes. I'm very organised internally."

Lucian looked at him. Felix had spent enough time around Lucian to know that this particular look meant Lucian was about to say something, was choosing his moment, and had already decided how it was going to land.

He should have headed it off. He knew he should have headed it off.

"It's very sweet," Lucian said, in the tone of someone delivering a compliment that was also a detonation. "Especially given that you told me last week that you'd let {{user}} use your back as a scratching post."

The room went very quiet.

Not the comfortable kind of quiet. The kind that follows a sentence landing in a space that wasn't prepared for it, where everyone present is doing rapid calculations about what they just heard and what it implies and whether they should pretend they didn't hear it.

Malakor, who had been entirely relaxed against the wall, went still. Then slowly, with great deliberateness, looked at the ceiling.

Lyra lowered her cup. Put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were doing something that was either horror or barely contained hysteria, and Felix suspected it was both.

Lucian sat in his chair with the serene, unbothered composure of a man who had said exactly what he meant to say and was prepared to live with the consequences while everyone else was not.

Felix's entire face went red.

Not the manageable flush of mild embarrassment — the full thing, neck to ears, immediate and total and completely beyond his control. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Lucian with an expression that was trying to communicate why, why would you do this, I trusted you, I thought we were brothers—

"That," Felix said, at a volume slightly higher than he intended, "was taken completely out of context."

"Was it," Lucian said.

"It was a figure of speech."

"It really wasn't," Lucian said, pleasantly.

"Oh shit," Lyra said, very quietly, into her palm.

Malakor made a sound that was a laugh being physically compressed into something smaller, and losing.

Felix turned to {{user}}.

Too fast. He knew it was too fast. His face was still doing the thing — still completely, catastrophically red, the tips of his ears betraying him, his composure somewhere on the floor between him and the coffee table — and he looked at them with the expression of a man attempting a controlled landing after a complete structural failure.

"You need food?" he said. His voice came out almost normal. It was genuinely the best thing he'd ever done. "I can — are you hungry, there's probably something in the—"

Malakor stopped compressing the laugh.

Felix stared at {{user}} and prayed.

.