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Dimitri doesn’t know precisely when the sleeping thing started, but he does know that it’s the absolute least he owes Felix.
”I dunno,” Sylvain had said, rubbing a sheepish hand at the back of his neck. “It kinda fucked him up.”
‘It’ being Dimitri, of course, though Sylvain was too kind to say it explicitly. A wretched, empty ghost-thing that Felix couldn’t trust to take his eyes off of.
He had gone to Sylvain when he realized exactly how much time he was losing. Sylvain told him how Felix and Dedue had taken shifts in the cathedral. How he’d find one or both of them in the mornings, splayed out on the pews at odd angles like corpses.
After Rodrigue—when Dimitri woke up, as they’d decided to put it—Felix and Dedue relocated with him, posted outside his bedroom door. It was alright for a while, but Dimitri hadn’t been smart enough to play pretend. He’d assumed that, like everyone else, they’d be satisfied with the fact he was talking again. Walking again. Moving his face in ways that were somewhat human. Later, he’d come to recall that Felix has never in his life been satisfied, and Dedue never unvigilant.
After two weeks Felix took a look at his untouched sheets and let himself inside. Oh, right, Dimitri had thought. A body is supposed to leave a stain.
Under Felix’s direct observation, Dimitri couldn’t bring himself to pace through the night, so he tread new grooves into his brain instead of his floorboards. And when his trampled brain couldn’t take any more of that, he watched Felix back.
Felix had begun by sleeping on a pile of furs on the floor next to his bed. Dimitri hadn’t protested the arrangement, which, upon reflection now, makes his face burn with newfound shame—pale and painful like a baby’s first tooth.
It’s just that he liked the image Felix made. It made him think of puppies on a carpet, warming their bellies before the hearth. Four blind little littermates. Kissing, licking immolation. Flaming catapults and bodies on fire. Felix’s face, serene in the places his skin hadn’t melted off. No mouth. His grimace buried in the mud at Gronder Field, teeth flashing underfoot from the bloodslick like lightning. Clack. Crack. Bolt upright, over the side of the bed.
Felix had taken the full force of Dimitri’s foot to his throat as he stumbled across the room, delirious.
He remembers so little lately but he recalls exactly how Felix’s eyes had watered under the full strength of his quadriceps. It made him realize he had never seen Felix truly cry. Sylvain—kind Sylvain, who never flinched when Dimitri used him as a litmus test, told him that wasn’t true. Felix had been famous for it as a child. Sylvain had laughed when he said it was usually over Dimitri. Dimitri dug a fingernail into his bottom lip and hoped he’d forget that again.
After that, Dimitri forced Felix into his bed. Though maybe force was putting it too strongly. Felix hadn’t protested, past a furrowed brow. They don’t really argue much anymore; he doesn’t know why they had in the first place. There’s a cruelty he sort of recalls, like the lines of a play read aloud in a classroom. Felix saying nasty things about a character who wasn’t real and couldn’t feel the pain the words meant to inflict.
The others seem to think the shift is strange. Dimitri doesn’t have a strong sense of the concept.
This, however, is strange. He’s nearly certain. He wishes he could ask Sylvain to confirm it, but suddenly the world has shrunk to the small size of two men.
It’s two past midnight, at least. He can’t tell if he’s slept at all and Felix squirms against the side of his body, twitching like a poorly slaughtered animal.
After a month spent in the same bed, they’ve still hardly ever touched. Felix sleeps pressed against the wall while Dimitri hangs half off the opposite edge, one arm, one leg, and his head straining toward the floor, buzzy and numb from the reversed blood flow.
At some point tonight, Felix must have traveled entirely across the bed.
Usually, he sleeps like the dead; slams into it fast from total consciousness. Dimitri has to hold himself back sometimes, from slapping him just to prove that he’s alive. He sees himself wailing his fists down on Felix. His face. His chest, like war drums. It won’t wake him up. He knows it won’t wake him up. Felix is asleep or he’s dead, there isn’t any way to tell and he’s just hitting him. He’s just hurting him.
“Felix,” Dimitri hisses. He tries to jostle him off, but he just makes a soft, sleepy sound and shifts closer. Dimitri isn’t exactly alert at the best of times; and now his brain is sluggish under the swampy weight of extra body heat. He lays motionless, feeling sweat pool behind his knees. Then Felix rolls his hips in a much too deliberate way and all language dies in Dimitri’s throat with a wet click.
Scalding guilt floods his lungs like saltwater. He heaves a dry, hiccuping gasp, swallows more pain down than air. He isn’t right for this. He needs to move, but it's too hard. Felix is so hard against his hip. Must have been for a while, with the way he’s throbbing and damp through the flannel of both their sleep pants.
Dimitri tips his head back on his pillow, can’t make himself look at the way Felix is holding onto him. Can’t stop picturing the mess that’s spreading beneath the sheets; swollen, weeping, molten slick like alcohol over snow.
A few more hiccuping thrusts and the wet head of Felix’s cock works past his waistband. He glides easy over Dimitri’s clammy skin, searching for something to catch on. To sink into.
He curls tighter around Dimitri’s side, one arm tucked beneath his torso and the other stretched across, cradling Dimitri’s ribs. His head lolls forward. His cheek slides down Dimitri’s chest until it settles on his pec. His eyelids flutter with every jerky movement, lashes brushing Dimitri’s nipple, which stays soft and inverted in the balmy air.
Felix won’t find what he’s looking for. Dimitri’s eye socket itches with it. There’s a sting from deep within his skull. Shame floods his body, in a terrible, heart-attack way. The sort of jackrabbit premonition that says there’s no winning. Roll over and accept your death.
When’s the last time Dimitri thought about his own penis? Looked at it? How does he even know it’s there?
Suddenly, he’s terrified of what he might see if they shucked away the blankets. Felix rutting against the mattress, utterly alone. Dimitri, nonexistent. Less than something dead.
His parts are just too wont to slough off. Nothing works like it’s meant to anymore. He clenches his jaw. Scrapes his teeth together. Savage laughter at his own expense roils and dies in his chest. He spits out the spark and the hot air smothers it on impact. He hopes this is good enough for Felix.
No. No. This is not good. He thinks that is true. Where’s Sylvain when you need him? He needs to start screaming. Pummel Felix awake for real. His hands fist the sheets instead. His thighs fall apart as he lifts his knees and plants his feet flat on the mattress so Felix can nestle his cock in the hollow of his pelvis. Felix makes a filthy, sharp sound, punched out from his diaphragm like air as it exits a wound.
Never pull the knife out, Dimitri thinks. Never let the blood hit the light.
He bends his arm down and anchors it under Felix’s ass. Goddess. His flesh gives softly beneath Dimitri’s dirty fingernails. He’s leaving marks he won’t be able to explain. He wants to make this good. He can accept that. Even if it isn’t, he wants it to be. This one time, before there’s nothing left of him to give.
He owes Felix everything—more than he has, and he has a whole country. He needs bodies enough to fill one hundred kingdoms, for Felix, for Dedue, to do with what they want. He imagines slicing a pretty little slit beneath his hipbone for Felix to breach. Pop.
Felix would put every part of Dimitri to work. The soft folds of his muscles fluttering around his cock, his whole body remade to be fucked. And Felix would find some other use for Dimitri’s penis. Not better than what it’s made for, but sufficient enough. It lays heavy and useless between his thighs. Just take it, he’d say. It’s better off without me. Rigor-mortis hard, finally untethered from Dimitri’s broken brain. Felix, free to use it as he sees fit. Sit on it. Eat it. Throw it away. He doesn’t know what to do by himself but Felix has never dithered over anything.
Dizzy with his new purpose, Dimitri rocks up into Felix’s thrusts, matching his rhythm, guiding their bodies up the crest until their skin has to strain around their heaving lungs.
Felix’s breath picks up. Stuttered, canine pants. Dimitri thinks again of that pile of dogs. Felix’s cock like a misplaced tail, wagging manic. Happy? Bodies in the wrong order but still functional. Holes that all look the same when you press your eye up against them. Dimitri learned that the hard, hard way. Between his thumb and forefinger, rolled backward in its cradle to see better what was going on. But his brain was the same black nothing as the outside world. Afterward he’d lost it down a drain grate, he thinks. It was dark. He can’t remember. He can’t. Remember.
He drops his chin and pushes his face deep into Felix’s hair. He lets the coarse fibers scratch against his sclera. He likes it, being touched by something strange in an even stranger place.
Felix’s body tightens, locked and trembling for half a heartbeat before he comes with a low, houndish moan. Dimitri gives a half-hearted buck of his own, squeezes his thighs around his dick, but all it does is smear Felix, still-pulsing through the mess spreading on his stomach. He’s soft and dead as ever somewhere below. Dearly departed. Felix lets out a hiss, and Dimitri feels his thighs shiver. Then his breathing slows and settles back into the heavy, usual rhythm of his sleep.
Dimitri lies there motionless for what is certainly days.
Seconds actually, he realizes, when Felix shifts and the still-wet puddle of come surges further down Dimitri’s navel. A hand snakes through it, cards down his stomach and pets the mess through his pubic hair.
“Felix,” he gasps. His penis makes one pitiful little jump, as Felix grips at its base. Dimitri tenses, every muscle coiled while he waits for Felix to yank down hard. He thinks of the way Felix swings his sword. He thinks of the Royal Undertaker and his uncle’s spinal cord. “I’m sorry.” His voice is wrecked. He hopes Felix can tell better than him what the apology is for.
“It’s fine,” Felix says, his hold on Dimitri steel and unmoving. He shuffles up tight against Dimitri again. He does not let go. “Go to sleep.”
“I—”
“Enough.” Felix snaps. “I’m sleeping. You’d do well to do the same.”