From the moment she's born, Jenna is loved, and by no one more so than her brother. He protects her and takes care of her as she grows up, and as she slowly begins to master her power over fire he finds himself respecting her, as well. They're a happy little family, just the four of them, and he wouldn't trade it for the world.
The storm is his worst nightmare come to life. She tries to get him to come with her to find Isaac and Garet—she doesn't think they'll survive on their own with the boulder looming. Felix tries to get her to see reason but she won't listen, because of course she won't. He eventually resorts to grabbing her arm and trying to drag her inside, but she slips out of his grip and loses her balance and falls into the river. He would have thrown himself in after her if it hadn't been for his father grabbing the back of his shirt at the last second, shouting at him to stand back and let the adults handle it.
"But she's a Mars Adept," he says desperately, "she's gonna die—"
The rest of it is a blur, except for that single moment, thousands of years long, where the boulder hovers over them and then crushes everything he knows into dust. His mother, his father, his sister.
They have the best funeral they can, given the circumstances and the lack of bodies. Felix stands with Isaac, who is mourning the loss of his mother, and they hold each others' hands so tight that the bones ache for days after.
Felix moves in with Garet's family, and for the amount of time that Isaac spends there he might as well be living with them, too. Felix tries to put on a brave face for the others, but his cover slips every time he opens his mouth, so he tries to avoid talking. He and Isaac and Garet speak in fragmented memories in the middle of the night when it's dark and they don't have to look at each other, and when someone's voice cracks they can pretend they didn't hear it.
"Remember that time your mom had to bake a cake for my birthday because my mom burned the one she made?" Felix half-smiles, staring up at a hairline crack in the ceiling.
Isaac laughs a little. "The four of us ate the whole thing before the party even started…"
"I had the worst stomachache, but it was so worth it."
"Garet, who are you kidding, nothing upsets your stomach. You wanted to eat that turtle we caught."
"Gramps says they do that far away, it's rich people food. Jenna was pissed, though, she wanted it for a pet."
"She used to run her hand through her bangs when she was mad."
"I forgot about that. Why did I forget that?" Isaac sounds distressed, and Felix squints hard at the crack in the ceiling, where he can just barely see moonlight peeking through. He hesitates.
"I'm starting to forget her voice."
There's silence, and then Isaac says, "Me too."
Garet sort of sighs from his side of the room, and Felix immediately feels guilty. He knows Garet hates it when they get like this, he hates dwelling on the sadness because he never knows what to say. In one particularly heated argument brought on by hormones and emotions kept pent up for too long, Isaac had shouted at him that he didn't understand because his whole family was still alive and unharmed, and Felix agreed. Garet had given them the silent treatment for a week.
The anniversaries pass, and it's been three years before Felix even knows it. People have stopped looking at him with pity so much, which he appreciates. The sooner everyone else stops worrying about it, the quicker he can bury it and never think of it again.
They get visitors from outside that day, and the whole town is quietly abuzz. They're pale with strange-colored skin and tattoos and one of them wears a mask. Garet swears up and down he saw them going towards the sanctum, but Felix doesn't believe it and drags him off to meet up with Isaac. They're nearly late for their appointment with Kraden, after all. They've been studying alchemy, trying to hone their Psynergy, and Felix is finally starting to feel like he's worth something now that he's becoming stronger.
Isaac's stuck doing chores for his dad, so they hang around until he's done, but it doesn't take much for Felix to notice exactly how thin Kyle's become. Thin and pale, with a worrisome cough. He brushes it off, says it's just the flu or a cold or something and they'd better hurry along before he gives it to them, but Isaac says on the walk to Kraden's that he's been worsening for months now.
Against everything Felix has ever been taught, everything he's ever believed, they break in to Sol Sanctum. Sacred ground. It's under the guise of looking for thieves, but Kraden's curiosity gets ahead of him and they follow because honestly, it's contagious.
He even wants to get the Elemental Stars himself, to study them, but when he nearly falls Felix has to step in (no one else is dying on his watch). "You two go get the…Stars, gem things, whatever—I'll just talk to him about science until you're back."
Isaac and Garet look rightfully nervous but they go, anyway, and as Isaac touches a hand to the second-to-last Star Felix feels cold steel press against his back and a woman's voice says, "No sudden movements."
He raises his hands in surrender, suddenly too hyped on adrenaline to even be scared, and he almost misses it when another woman, sounding younger, says "Don't hurt him, Menardi."
There's something about the second voice that he recognizes, and he can't put his finger on what.
Kraden's rambling something about how these people are the thieves planning on stealing the Stars, but Felix is scrambling, brain reaching for something that he hasn't thought about in years—
"Remove your mask, Jenna."
Impossible.
Heedless of the sword inches from his body, he turns and looks straight into the slitted eyes of the mask, trying to see through it.
The shorter of the two women raises a hand to her mask, yanks so hard that the string around the back breaks, and drops it to the ground.
It's her. It's her. It's her.
She's older, taller, her face is thinner and her eyes are darker. But it's her, she's alive somehow, and she smiles (a sad little shadow of the smile she used to have) and says "I'm sorry, Felix."
"You died," he whispers, head spinning, nauseated, and she shakes her head.
"They saved me. I've been living with them in Prox and I've learned a lot from them."
"Prox? Where in the hell is Prox, you couldn't have just come home? Jenna, I had no one—"
"We don't have time for this," the man with them snaps, "we need the Elemental Stars!" He grabs Felix's wrist, and Jenna's reaction is immediate, grabbing the man's shoulder to spin him around and getting right up in his face.
"How dare you touch my brother," she says, and Felix is simultaneously horrified by his little sister facing down a man twice her size, and thrilled that she could still call Felix her brother.
They make it out of the now-collapsing Sanctum with three of the stars and another addition to their party, Alex—a man with long blue hair that Felix immediately does not trust. His speech is polite, but Felix has the sense that the man is hiding some other meaning behind every word he says. He doesn't seem terribly worried about Isaac and Garet, like it doesn't matter to him if they live or die, and that makes Felix's blood boil.
It relieves him, at least, that Jenna doesn't seem to trust Alex either, glaring at him and slapping his hand away when he tries to help her across a crack in the ground.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Felix had always wanted to leave Vale. But he never, ever, in his darkest dreams thought that it would be as a hostage, with his formerly deceased sister part of the group that kidnapped him. They hike for a long time, and he's distantly aware that his feet are aching, unused to this much activity. They make camp when night falls, and Jenna sits down next to Felix like it's nothing, like she hasn't been dead for three years.
Quietly, by the flickering light of the campfire, she explains everything—the fate of their parents and Isaac's mother, captives in Prox at the edge of the world. The lighthouses. The restoration of Alchemy. Felix nods along and pretends to understand everything she says, when in reality it's all too much, too fast, and it's all he can do to just let her words rush over him and hope he absorbs enough to make sense of it later, when he has time to think.
She looks at him when she's done talking and says again: "I'm sorry, Felix."
He meets her eyes, then looks away, into the fire, and shakes his head. "Not your fault."
He's dead tired, but he doesn't sleep well that night, or any night for the next several months. He can't, because any pressure on his sister's shoulders is pressure on his shoulders too. He's her big brother, isn't he? What kind of a brother would just let her take the weight of the world alone? He offers to fight alongside the others, and after some discussion Saturos lends him a short sword.
Jenna's angry, he can see that much. She tells him, often, that he shouldn't be here. There's no malice in it, she just wants him to be safe at home. But it still hurts.
The last time she says it is in Venus Lighthouse, when he's slashed across the chest by a Chimera. It's under her breath, she obviously hadn't meant for him to hear. But he hears anyway.
He snaps, "Get used to it, little sister, I'm not going anywhere." And then heals the wound, the quiet thrumming power of the as-yet-unlit Venus Lighthouse bolstering his Psynergy, and perhaps his confidence.
She looks at him, surprised, and then wordlessly helps him back to his feet.
When they reach the top of the lighthouse, Saturos and Menardi send them back down with Kraden to head for Idejima. But they've scarcely made it down the stairs when Jenna shakes her head and says, "I don't trust them with Sheba. I have to go back."
They let her go, and Felix doesn't regret it until later, when he looks at his sister's crumpled body on Idejima's beach and thinks, for one horrifying moment, that she might be dead again. The truth is almost worse—she'd jumped from the top of the lighthouse and into the raging ocean, just to save Sheba. Their tiny river at home in Vale was nothing compared to the ocean. The difference, he supposes, is that the ocean was her choice. And at least this time she'd survived.
A freak accident of nature causes a tidal wave to slam them into a continent unknown to them, and in a tiny waterlogged inn in Daila, she starts to apologize again. For what, he's not sure—for saying he shouldn't be around, for jumping off the lighthouse and scaring him half to death, for this entire wild goose chase across continents. He stops her doing it because he doesn't want her apologizing anymore for things that aren't her fault.
He just says, "I'm with you."
Sheba's voice, sleepy but indignant, pipes up from one of the inn beds: "Hey, I'm here too, you know."
They laugh, and eventually, finally, Felix gets the most restful sleep he's had in months. Things don't seem so bad anymore, now that they're not constantly under the watchful eye of Alex and the Proxians. Kraden is talkative and keeps their minds busy with puzzles as they hike, and Sheba is mischievous with a biting sense of humor. Piers, when he joins them, is quiet but carries a sense of calmness with him wherever he walks.
Jenna is stubborn, fierce, quick to anger. Felix understands that it's her way of fighting the guilt. When he can get her to smile, he revels in it, and piece by piece he can see her carefree smile emerging—the same one she had when she was younger.
Months and months and what feels like millions of years later, they finally make it to the aerie of Mars Lighthouse. Surrounded by their friends and family in various states of injury, Jenna squeezes his arm.
"We're going home together," she says, before she flings the final Star into the well.
She keeps her promise, she gets them home. And in the ruins of Vale, after everyone is found safe, she finally lets herself cry. She'd been stoic for so long, Felix can only imagine what it must feel like to release it all at once. He doesn't hug her until she's dried her eyes, because he doesn't want to embarrass her, but when he does he never wants to let go.
"It's over, sis," he says. "You saved us."
"Don't be an idiot," she says, squeezing his ribs so hard he thinks she may break one of them. "I couldn't have done it without the others. Without you."
Sheba latches on to them, and then Isaac, and within seconds it's become a massive group hug, with their parents watching amusedly from the sidelines. Felix had been told by Sheba that it's possible for any Adept to feel other peoples' emotions, if the feelings are strong enough. He's never experienced it until now, when all eight of them are so relieved, so tired, so happy, that he can feel it singing through his bones. He shuts his eyes and absorbs it, commits the feeling to memory, and he knows that no matter what comes next for them, no matter what happens, they will be okay.