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There’s no direct ventilation pumping into the SkyTubes™ structure at the local Chuck E. Cheese. Even amidst the coldest December on record, the body heat of dozens of kids all trapped together in a network of impermeable plastic cylinders has raised the ambient temperature to about ten degrees higher than it is down on the ground; everyone inside is sweating in their long sleeve shirts and sweaters. Up here, every sound, every smell, is immeasurably amplified. The stench of dirty socks and cheesy pizza hangs heavy in the air around them. There’s a chorus of little kids screaming off in the distance and an alarm from one of the arcade machines on the ground keeps going off at unpredictable intervals. Someone definitely threw up in the monkey cage one level below. The whole place is a sensory overload, the closest thing to hell on earth any of them have ever experienced—it’s also the best birthday party Felix has ever been to.
The seven of them have set up camp at the highest point of the SkyTubes, in a rectangular shaped space the size of six smaller tubes stuck together. There’s only one way in—a climbing net leading up from the floor below—and a slide to the ground on their left for an easy escape. It’s as tactically sound a position as they could hope for; all that’s left to do is hold it.
Right now, Edelgard and her allies are on the move. The sound of their advance echoes through the tubes from somewhere below: the hollow thumping of knees and the slapping of open palms against plastic rising up like a battle cry as they crawl unceasingly forward. Annette is peering out through one of the bubble windows, vibrating with a combination of anxiety and the pitcher of soda she’d finished off at lunch, as she tries to place their exact location. Beside her, Mercedes works quickly to tend to their latest casualty, placing a bright colored bandaid across a raw patch of skin on Ashe’s knee. Static electricity pulls pieces of her hair up toward the top of the tubes, strong enough that when her fingers make contact with his skin, the sound of the resulting shock is audible.
“Why did you let your stepsister invite her friends to your party, anyway?” Ingrid asks, voice pitched low so as not to give away the specifics of their location. She’s stationed at the left side of the entrance, Sylvain at the right, each with a pile of multicolored, hollow balls corralled in front of them. Together, they make up the camp’s first line of defense, ready to rain down a volley of firepower the moment Dimitiri gives the signal. At twelve and a half, Sylvain is getting too old for this. The angle he has to hold his head at just to sit up here looks painful. Felix has caught him wincing once or twice, though it might have more to do with the fresh-looking bruise blooming from under the collar of his sweater than the position of his head. They hadn’t even tried to bring Dedue; he’s been down in the ballpit since before the game started.
None of them have left the tubes for almost an hour now, and their resources are dwindling. The vast majority of their remaining ammunition is stuffed into Ashe’s discarded hoodie, set on the ground next to Felix’s knees. They’d tied the strings tight enough at the neck to make a makeshift sack, filling it with balls from the pit at ground level before climbing up. There's enough plastic firepower in there to hold Edelgard and her crew off for a while, but not forever; they’re going to need to abandon their position sooner than he’d expected. Felix doesn’t like being held at a disadvantage. He snorts derisively. “Like he had a choice.”
Dimitri, newly ten years old and wearing a gold paper birthday crown to prove it, frowns softly. “My father thought it might help us get to know each other better. Are you not having fun?”
“Well, sure we are–” Sylvain begins, evidently speaking for everyone. It’s hard for Felix to resist the urge to roll his eyes at how placative his tone sounds; it’s pretty clear—at least, it is to Felix—that Sylvain is phoning in the majority of his enthusiasm for the game. He isn’t really having fun, he’s just trying not to hurt Dimitri’s feelings. Felix doesn’t know why he’s even bothering. None of them have seen Sylvain in over a month. They should have left him flirting with the older girls down in the arcade. “–but do some of them seem a little too into this to you? I thought that Caspar kid was gonna push Ashe right off the top of the slide.”
Behind Felix, Ashe winces. “It was an accident. I think.”
“And anyway, have you met Felix?” Anette asks. “He’s taking this waaaaay more seriously than anyone else.”
She doesn’t mean it as a compliment. Felix shoots her a glare over his right shoulder; she sticks her tongue out at him in response. It’s not Felix’s fault that he likes being good at things he finds worth doing. Or that staging a high stakes game of modern warfare in the SkyTubes of their local Chuck E. Cheese just happened to be something that was right up his alley. Maybe he’s a bit more competitive than the rest of them, but so what? It wasn’t like it made him weird or anything.
“Well I think it’s sweet that you’re including her,” Mercedes chimes in. Felix hasn’t decided what he thinks about Annette’s high school aged babysitter joining them up here, but at least she seems to be taking her role as medic more seriously than Sylvain. “She could probably use a few new friends, changing schools in the middle of the year and all.”
“I don’t think she’s having a hard time making friends,” Sylvain laughs, albeit humorlessly. He’s right. There are five other kids in the tunnels with her now, and two more left stationed somewhere on the ground. Not bad for only two months in her new class. Overall, though they’ve got Edelgard in sheer numbers, she’s already outmaneuvered them twice in the lower levels. Felix won’t underestimate her again.
But movement in Felix’s periphery draws his eye toward the camp’s entrance. He peers over the edge of their makeshift blind—a structure built out of the giant foam shapes they’d dragged up from the Toddler Zone—just in time to catch a flash of pale blue hair at the bottom of the net. The sound of movement from the tunnels has vanished completely; the silence left in its wake is ominous.
Felix has just enough time to hiss out a warning—”watch out!”—and then the battle begins.
At first, things go exactly the way they’d planned. Sylvain and Ingrid step forward to block off the entrance, flinging the hollow balls down at the invaders like javelins from a castle keep. Those first volleys make direct contact—Felix can tell by the little noises of surprise that echo back up the net. There’s enough of them raining down that Edelgard’s team doesn’t have much of a choice. Just like they’d hoped, the advance falls temporarily back and out of range.
But Edelgard has an answer already prepared. Stupid of them to assume she wouldn’t. From her position at the window, Annette calls out, “they’re bringing shields!”
Felix arrives at the window just in time to watch a short girl with purple hair—Bernadetta, maybe—rushing into the ground level tunnels with a stack of food service trays from the kitchen clasped between her hands. The perfect rebuttal; they might be slow and off balance climbing with only one hand, but no amount of firepower is going to stop them once those trays arrive. They’re going to have to shift tactics.
Dimitri nods to him, apparently in agreement. “Seal the entrance.”
It’s not a foolproof maneuver, but they’re running out of options. Sylvain and Ingrid fall back far enough that Felix, Ashe and Annette can push the foam pieces of what used to be their blind forward, wedging them tight across the entrance. There’s just enough open space left for someone to lob down the occasional warning shot.
“We can’t hold this position,” Ingrid is calling over the sound of all the activity. “This won’t keep them back for long.”
“Take Dimitri and fall back to the rendezvous point,” Felix shouts back. “I’ll keep them busy.”
Ingrid gives him a solemn nod and turns to maneuver Dimitri into the blue covered slide. The rendezvous point is the cheese maze that runs under the stage in the dining area. Predictable, maybe, but with the map Ashe had scribbled out earlier in the day, it’s their best chance for a place to lay low—if they can manage to escort Dimitri there without being seen. Dedue, who should be waiting at the bottom of the slide, is their best hope for that.
Before Ingrid can drag him away, Dimitri reaches out a hand to clasp Felix on the arm. His blue eyes sparkle earnestly, even in the low light, when he speaks. “Thank you, my friend.”
But there isn’t time for this sort of sentimental nonsense. It doesn’t matter that Edelgard seems to have paused momentarily in her advance, Sylvain is down to just a handful of balls left to throw. At any moment, Petra and Caspar will come tearing up the climbing net with Edelgard and the rest of her retinue close behind. If they capture Dimitri and the crown now, all their hard work so far will have been for nothing.
“Just go already,” Felix snaps, shaking Dimitri off and giving him a firm push towards the mouth of the slide. This time, Ingrid doesn’t wait; she grabs Dimitri’s ankle and pulls him down quickly after her. A moment later, they’ve vanished into the dark shadow of the slide's first curve with Ashe, Mercedes, and Annette following closely behind.
Then it’s just Sylvain left. Felix watches from the corner of his eye as Sylvain awkwardly crouch-walks his way across to the slide, too. But he never actually makes it down. Instead, he pivots sideways just inside the slide’s mouth, back braced against one wall and his legs pressed against the other, effectively wedging himself in place. It doesn’t look like a particularly comfortable position.
Felix frowns. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” Sylvain asks instead of answering, raising his eyebrows. But Felix knows by the shape of the grin playing at the corner of Sylvain’s mouth that he’s not actually expecting an answer, just trying to rile him up. Felix doesn’t take the bait. “What’s it look like? I’m blocking the slide. Can’t follow Dimitri if they can’t get down.”
It’s a good idea; Felix is a little annoyed he wasn’t the one to come up with it. He grumbles, “I said I could handle it.”
“Well, now you’ve got backup,” Sylvain shrugs. “Besides, with those scrawny legs? They’d push you down no problem.”
The thing is, Felix and Sylvain used to be exactly this kind of packaged deal. When Ingrid and Dimitri were too busy chasing around after Glenn to stop for Felix, Sylvain had always been there with a hand outstretched, waiting. He never seemed to mind that Felix was younger, that he cried more, that he couldn’t run as fast or climb as high. Instead, he was patient without being patronizing, a combination of traits that Glenn had always lacked—when it came to Felix, at least.
But the older they get, the farther apart two-years-eight-months is starting to feel. Felix hasn’t seen Sylvain nearly as much since he started middle school last year. Always busy after class, never able to come to the phone on the weekends. Lately, he’s even stopped showing up for the dinner parties their parents took turns hosting—including the ones at his own house. It’s not as if he’d ever given a reason, either. To Felix, it felt like maybe Sylvain was outgrowing the rest of them, like he was suddenly too good for the kind of games they’d always used to play. It wasn’t a new experience for Felix; he’d already lost Glenn to that ubiquitous experience of ‘growing up’. The idea of losing Sylvain now, too, made Felix uneasy and on edge in a way that was difficult for him to put a name to. Felix has never liked being left behind.
So maybe he’s been punishing Sylvain a little for it this whole day: walking away when Sylvain tried to stand next to him, rolling his eyes instead of laughing along at Sylvain’s stupid jokes. So what? If Sylvain wanted to spend all his time with his new, older friends, Felix wasn’t going to just stand around waiting for him to remember Felix existed. He could change too.
But the way Sylvain is smiling over at him now—a little apologetic, a little hopeful—is doing something to Felix’s ironclad resolve. And when Sylvain pats the slide next to him expectantly… well, Sylvain’s right about one thing. It’s definitely going to be harder to get past them if they stick together.
“You better not bail the second they get here,” Felix mumbles, climbing into the tube with his back pressed to the opposite wall of Sylvain.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sylvain agrees. He knocks one of his knees against the side of Felix’s leg for emphasis.
The gesture’s too sincere for Felix, whose emotional state is still landing somewhere solidly between ‘angry at being ignored for so long’ and ‘embarrassingly relieved to know Sylvain still likes him’. He scoffs, glancing away and towards the mercifully still-barricaded entrance. “Whatever.”
“Hey, I mean it—“ Sylvain continues, voice suddenly serious as he tries to lean over and catch Felix’s eye—hard to do balanced at the top of a slide. The blue-tinted darkness makes Sylvain’s expression difficult to read, but his eyes are big and insistent, like he really wants Felix to understand something. “I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to ditch you guys. I just—“
Sylvain cuts himself off, raking a hand across his already messy hair as he exhales a short breath through his nose. Felix eyes him carefully in return, silent. Despite what Glenn and their dad seem to think, Felix isn’t a little kid anymore. He can tell there’s something Sylvain isn’t saying, something behind the words of his apology that Sylvain is struggling with. Even now, with anger still plastered thick over his hurt, Felix desperately wants to be the kind of friend Sylvain can talk to about something like that. He doesn’t know how to communicate those kinds of feelings, though. Not yet. All he can do is wait for Sylvain to speak again.
Finally, Sylvain sighs. “Listen, I’ll be here as long as you want me around, okay? I promise.”
Beyond the barricade, the sound of shouting voices grows louder. Time really is running out, now. Felix asks, “even if that means sacrificing yourself to Dimitri’s stepsister and her friends?”
“I can think of worse ways to die,” Sylvain shrugs. “At least we’ll go together.”
Death, however, might be coming sooner than either of them thinks. The foam blocks in front of the entrance shudder as the first blows land against it, one of the smaller squares at the top falling to the ground with a soft thud. They might have reached the end of the line, but at this point, neither of them is really even paying attention.
“Then that’s the plan,” Felix says with a resolute nod. He holds out the elbow wedged between them for Sylvain to link his arm through. A clear message: if Sylvain falls, then Felix falls too. “We stay together until we die together.”
It takes a moment—a beat of hesitation where Sylvain stares down at Felix’s arm like he’s unsure of whether or not he should actually take it—but in the end, a genuine smile creeps across the features of Sylvain’s face.
“Sure,” he agrees, “if that’s what you want. Stay together until we die together.”
The rest of the foam blocks fly away from the mouth of the tunnel like a detonated explosion.
Sylvain slips his arm through Felix’s.
And, together, they wait.