#of course not. happy pride everyone. throws confetti and disappears

[spilycoris]

happy gay month to narilamb and narilamb only

[fandomsilhouette]

the fire I began (is burning me alive)

In the wake of everything he’s managed to destroy, Felix sifts through the dust and sand to see what he can salvage. Somewhere in between the heated guilt of failure and the cool stubbornness of pride, he manages to find himself in the innocence of children and the needleprick pain of an apology. 

As it happens, there’s more to happiness than a smile. There’s more to Felix, too. 

Happy @felixmonth, y’all! 

She makes it impossible to apologize. The thought crosses Felix’s mind before he shakes it away. No. He has made it impossible to apologize, with three years of back and forth bad behavior and no remorse to speak of. It had always seemed like a sign of maturity to keep every emotion lurking beneath the surface tension of his skin. Felix was a good boy, a calm boy. So why had the whole camp been against him? Felix didn’t stir up trouble. All he did was say what everyone was thinking. 

Well. Clearly not everyone. Actually, almost no one except Chloe herself, who only heard the abstract idea of it (thank goodness, or she would’ve been insufferable too). She seemed to know as soon as school started in the fall, despite finally managing to convince her father to let her skip camp. 

“I’m so glad someone finally said it. That Dupain-Cheng girl is the worst, don’t you think? She really just gets whatever she wants, which is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous! No one can live like that, it’s absurd.” Chloe had latched onto Felix’s arm and hasn’t stopped talking since she found him. “And the way she does it!! It’s like no one else realizes she’s just being nice until they do what she wants. I knew people were dumb, but this is just--” 

“Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.” Felix drones out the words, all too familiar with her catchphrase even if she hadn’t repeated it twelve times in the span of her current rant. She doesn’t seem to notice his complete disinterest and clutches tighter at his arm, delighted. 

“Exactly!!” If she keeps this up, Felix is going to have bruises in the shape of her claws at the end of this, assuming she doesn’t just take his arm back to class. 

What did he even do wrong? All he said was what he knew. Was it too public? Was it his tone, that mysterious, ambiguous variable of intonation so hard for Felix to grasp? Was it the truth, too heavy for a slip of a girl like Marinette to bear? But she carried the weight of Chloe’s thorns and lashes with all the dignity and poise of a queen. She turned Chloe’s barbs into blossoms with all the skill and arts of a wordsmith, a master at her craft. 

Chloe turns the page on her rant and gestures wildly, nearly hitting Felix in the chest, and he has finally had enough. It’s been almost a month of school being plagued by Chloe’s agreement and a dawning feeling of unease, as though anything Chloe agrees with is necessarily wrong, and the tension finally snaps, a clean, clear break. 

Felix yanks his arm away and storms off. It’s time to do what he does best: sulk. 

Sulking is perhaps… a more generous term for what he does. Felix spends the rest of the fall semester hiding, slipping away from Marinette, watching her fend off the reluctant bullies falling quickly in line under Chloe’s regime and struggling to reconcile the way his stomach churns at the memory of what he said to the determined stubbornness of the truth in his mind. There’s something wrong in the way that he can’t look Marinette in the eyes anymore, on the days she sticks around long enough for Felix to even try. 

It takes him embarrassingly long to think about trying to live the way she does, to walk in her footsteps long enough to see exactly how broken and mercenary she is. Embarrassed and flustered and humiliated at the way a smile looks so unnatural on his features, Felix slinks away afterschool to volunteering at the library where toddlers don’t judge him for the way his lips stretch too tight across his skin and his cheeks flush a ruddy pink, blotchy and uneven. 

It’s… relaxing, to read to children. Felix falls into an easy cadence, voice rolling on the undulating waves of the story plots as they warble their approval cross-legged on rainbow colored floors. He finds himself slipping into voices, growling and snapping, cheering, squeaking, whispering, crowing, sitting up straighter to sound a little braver than he is. He finds himself leaning in, looking each child in the eyes as the tension builds. His favorites are the ones who reach for the books when he’s done and ask to read it again, the ones who cluster by his feet and watch with wide eyes as the pages turn. When his shifts end, he lets them follow him like ducks and pulls out his old favorites from the shelves for them to taste. 

Felix doesn’t realize how much he loves it here, no matter the sticky grubby palms and the tears and the wailing and whining. It seems natural by the time he lifts up one of the kids to sit in his lap, bouncing them along to the beat of the plot. He doesn’t think twice of it. 

The librarians do, and one of them pulls out a camera. 

Felix doesn’t see it until his face is splashed across promotional flyers, glossy and shining in the evening light. He’s never seen his face like that. He takes one home. 

It’s not that he’s smiling in the photo. But there’s something in his expression that has managed to completely transform his normally dour glumness into something… bright, no matter how little he smiles. It’s warm and comforting and familiar. 

It’s Marinette’s smile. 

Well, not really. There’s no smile there to compare. But his eyes are bright and wide, and his body is leaned into the camera. Tension has disappeared from his shoulders. He looks happy. 

He was happy, when the photo was taken. 

Oh.

Felix has an apology to make. 

Somehow, it has taken him most of the year to realize that not only is Marinette avoiding him, the teachers are helping her. They refuse to allow Felix to pair with her for projects, or sit next to her. Everytime he gets close to cornering her on break, she slips away with Nino or into a classroom where the teachers won’t let him enter and swear that she’s not in, no matter how much he can see her hair peeking out between the blinds. Maybe he’ll have better luck at camp. 

He doesn’t. 

Felix has never liked Luka, older-camper-turned-counselor who was way too partial to Marinette despite being three years older than her. In his opinion, Luka has no business being around Marinette at all. In anyone else’s opinion, Luka and Marinette were childhood friends through his little sister Juleka, and there was nothing wrong with it at all. Their easy laughter made Felix’s blood boil on the best of days, and the last three weeks of camp had been anything but. 

The teachers ushered Marinette into their protection under the guise of homework help and extracurriculars. Luka just whisks her away and throws his head back in laughter. Nino joins them and they huddle over notes scribbled into notebooks and Marinette’s clear voice carrying across the lake. 

...maybe Felix should just leave a note. 

He manages to go through an entire notebook’s worth of trashed apologies before he throws the book across the room and storms out. He has no idea where he’s going but it darn well better lead him to something he can give her to hold onto, to remember that she saw him once as a boy worth helping up a cliff, a boy worth keeping still for as he slept. Felix tears out the meadow grass as he walks and shreds it into angry confetti blowing back into his face on the wind. It’s picking up and Felix is starting to struggle against it enough that when the arts and crafts building comes into view, he doesn’t think twice before stepping in. 

He’s been avoiding it all summer, and for good reason. Reminders of Marinette are splashed up against every wall, every surface: her sewing kit strewn across a corner here, her lyrics spread out on a table there, projects propped up in various stages of completeness. It’s her haven, Felix can see that just by the way she lights up (the way she smiles, some part of him whispers now) when she walks in or talks about it. 

Something catches the light from across the room and Felix goes to investigate. A needle has managed to find its way out of her kit and is glimmering as the treetops sway in the wind and expose the metal to sunlight like a metronome. Three beats pass to the rhythm of his heart. 

An idea strikes, and the clouds that have been building all day finally burst. 

Felix spends the rest of the afternoon hunched over a workbench, ignorant to the announcements being made across camp to come back to the cabins, ignorant of the pain spiking up his back and the pinpricks of the needle on his fingertips. He works fast, a little messy, a little quick, and doesn’t mind the way the tears blur his vision. 

It isn’t until he’s racing to Marinette’s cabin in the pouring rain, prize clutched carefully to his chest in plastic wrap, that anyone finds him. It’s Luka, because of course it is, and Felix can already hear the lecture from across the field. Felix is a good boy. Felix follows the rules. Felix takes one look at Luka and sprints faster. 

He doesn’t get to see Marinette before he’s hauled off back to his cabin getting an earful about safety and following camp instructions, but as Luka pulls him away from her cabin, he throws the package at her steps and hopes it lands. 

After that, he collapses in a warm bath and lets the tension drain from his body, Luka’s words and warm water lapping at him in equal measure. 

She doesn’t talk to him or seek him out that summer, but he sees the pillow he’s made propped up in her window with the apology card settled neatly next to it. The two birds on the front lean into each other, curled up and happy, or whatever passes as happy with Felix’s sloppy stitching. When he stops to gape, she mouths the words he stitched so painstakingly and winks. 

Please keep smiling.