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“And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Furina returns to Fontaine beneath a new moon, a barely-visible sliver in the sky like the cut of a blade or the edge of a scale.
Neuvillette would worry about her — he, far too many times across the centuries, has borne witness to the evidence of what happens to well-shod travellers in the dark — but for two things: her travelling companions, and all the water in Teyvat. The ponds and rivers track her movements; the Great Lake sings its welcome right down in both their bones. Were something to happen to Furina, he suspects neither of them would need to lift a finger for the water to intervene.
Still, it is not a theory he wishes to see tested, and despite Navia and Clorinde’s respective talents in combat, he is relieved to hear the familiar click of her heels along the corridor and the cheerful jingle of her keys in the lock.
She shuffles through the entrance hall — weighed down with luggage, he surmises, though he had brought her piles of matching bags home with him only a few hours ago. He had wondered if her attempts at a “simple, human life” may extend to her packing habits, but the three hat-boxes for a two-day trip had seen him happily disabused of the notion. She deserves, now more than ever, to drown in luxury. Next, to the kitchen, where one of her bags falls to the floor, and Neuvillette’s sharp ears catch a string of muttered curses. Then she falls silent, and keeps moving. Looking for him, he realises, with a rush of helpless, arrogant affection, before he hears another click-click-click, and the soft tap of gloved fingers on his bedroom door. “Neuvillette? Are you there?”
“I am. Welcome home.” He pauses, and the fingers tap down once more against the wood. Hesitant. “Would you like to come in?”
The door swings open almost instantly, and her face appears around the frame, round and pearl-pale and perfect, hat tugged firmly down over her ears. “There you are,” she says, and then puffs her cheeks out in a put-upon manner. “This is an extremely lacklustre welcome ceremony, Monsieur. I’ve had better from the Fortress of Meropide.”
“The Fortress of Meropide contains a great many of your devoted fans,” Neuvillette reminds her. A sour taste creeps to the back of his throat, as it always does when he thinks about those people. He recalls a morning twenty years ago, when he had come in to work and found the crumpled body of the man who had leapt from the roof of the Palais Mermonia in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Furina through her bedroom window. He recalls letters slipped beneath a guarded door and five dark bruises wrapped around her wrist like a cuff.
“And you don’t count yourself amongst those fans?” She gives him an arch look, but Neuvillette detects a note of anxiety beneath that careless facade.
Neuvillette had been Focalors’ high priest. It had been a tongue-in-cheek appointment, one of Furina’s little jokes: he had rankled at the implications, in the beginning, but as the centuries passed he had begun to take pride in it as he did the rest of his duties. Even now, with the Hydro Archon’s throne destroyed and her divinity dead by her own hand, he cannot bring himself to remove the position from his list of official titles. He had commanded her house of worship, her Opera Epiclese, and in doing so he had sealed her death warrant.
But that was her plan all along, he reminds himself. My Furina and I were merely puppets, carried along by the strings of fate. We could not have changed anything even if we had known the truth.
He doesn’t say that. There is something odd about Furina’s mood, something beyond the usual ever-present insecurity — a fragility that she is as always ill-equipped to handle. For all Focalors’ talk of a happy mortal life, she had not bothered leaving her human self any idea how to achieve such a thing.
“You know you don’t need to knock,” he reminds her instead. The Neuvillette of three hundred years ago, who would have given anything for some semblance of personal space, would be horrified. The Neuvillette of today hates him for it, just a little.
Furina smiles — not her stage smile, red-lipped and flawless, or her real smile, crooked and conspiratorial, showing off teeth just a little too sharp for such a human face. This one is dry and bright, and it sits uncomfortably on her face like an ill-fitting mask. “I can’t just come barging in,” she says, conveniently ignoring the fact that she has done precisely that multiple times a week since their very first meeting. “What if you were naked?”
Neuvillette blinks “Why would I be naked?”
“Well, you never know! When I was living in the Vasari Passage, I got a letter intended for my upstairs neighbour, and when I went to deliver it I found her—”
Neuvillette thinks it best to cut this train of thought off — out of respect for a citizen’s privacy, of course, but also very much for the sake of his own mental wellbeing. Centuries of keeping secrets has made Furina prone to oversharing sometimes in her retirement. “Rest assured that if my door is unlocked, I will invariably be fully clothed. Would you like to sit down?”
Her lips twitch, smile tipping sideways to a rueful edge. “I’m going to take myself off for a bath,” she says. “Nobody told me travelling would be so dirty. I feel as if I’ve carried half of Liyue’s road dust back with me. But… can I come back afterwards?”
“I will be sure to prepare an adequate second welcome for your return,” Neuvillette tells her solemnly.
The statement was intended to tease, but he finds there is truth in it, too. As she bathes, he piles her bags of souvenirs beside the luggage he had brought back with him, and prepares a supper of sliced baguette and expensive cheese, sticky and sun-pale, hidden beneath its bitter rind of armour. She has no doubt eaten her fill of Liyuen delicacies, but there are a number of strategies they have discovered in the last few weeks to help her sleep: a late dinner, an open window, her ear pressed firmly to Neuvillette’s heart.
Nobody drowns. Nobody dies. The water remains still behind its banks.
He returns to his bedroom to find her already there, nestled into the corner of his bed, a deluge of pillows arranged about her like a dreamer’s throne. There is a novel open on her lap, pages pinched between her thumb and forefinger to mark her place, but her gaze has settled blankly against a whitewashed stretch of wall. Like this, she looks more like a painting than ever before — a silver shade of the Reimurian Somnus, reclining into eternal sleep.
Again: the thought of losing her pricks at him like a needle, a concentrated pain he cannot bring himself to focus on lest it sever him completely. Instead, he settles himself and the platter down beside her and clears his throat. “…Is there something on your mind?”
Furina takes a moment to react. Then she blinks, as if surfacing from some invisible body of water, and half-turns to face him. The lanternlight turns her hair to tangled moonbeams. “Is it… that obvious?”
“You have been very quiet.”
“That’s not unusual.”
She is right, of course — unmasked, Furina’s temperament shifts and flows like the waters she once reigned over, predictable only in its unpredictability. She is not different people, she had explained weeks ago, clinging to Neuvillette’s hand in the dark; she is merely made up of far more distinct pieces than most humans are. A half-dozen actors in the play that is Furina. The soft, plaintive silence is nothing new to either of them. It is only the distance to it that concerns him.
Furina puts aside her novel. It is an old one, written in a dialect of Fontainian that fell out of fashion mere decades after Neuvillette first took up his post as Iudex; this is her dozenth re-reading. He wonders if he can blame the long-dead author for her current obsession with detective stories — their bookshelves are full to the point of overflowing, and she has taken to stacking piles of paperbacks in Neuvillette’s water cabinet instead. “…I actually wanted to talk to you about something,” she says.
That is her serious voice. Truly serious, in a way she rarely is, even now. Dull dread drips between Neuvillette’s ribs. “…Oh?”
“Do you remember the young woman I met in Chenyu Vale? Director Hu. Her funeral parlour has outlived both of us, isn’t that funny? She was very helpful about supplying me with all the props I needed, and she even promised to send me some of her poetry! But… as befitting someone of her profession, she talked a lot about death.”
Neuvillette does remember. The words “inevitable demise” had featured in her directions towards Yilong Port, the very first sentence she had spoken to him. Over by the tea-cart her consultant — a tall man, oddly familiar even with his back turned, though Neuvillette cannot for the life of him figure out why — had hidden his chuckle behind a delicate, pointed cough, clearly more aware of their specific situations than his employer. Something about the cough had irritated Neuvillette, and he had been extremely hesitant about leaving Furina alone with such a strange pair. But she had insisted, and he would rather live out the rest of his days in Sumeru’s desert wastelands than compromise her fragile newfound freedom. Immortality. “I do recall something to that effect, yes.”
Furina picks at the delicate silk embroidery on the bedspread. Her hands are ungloved, and the faint marbled scarring from the primordial seawater catches the light as she twists her wrist. “Right. And it was interesting, at first, to notice how huma— ahem, how other humans talked about death. But then she offered me a funeral package.”
Neuvillette closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want to have to think about it, not when it will be inescapable soon enough. Live, he wants to beg her. Stay with me forever. It would be so easy to ensure her survival. But she has lived far longer than any human would wish to, and withstood far more pain and fear than any other human could have survived. He has no right to ask this of her.
“Did you take it?” He asks. He does not want to know the answer.
Furina is quiet for a moment, in her coffin of pillows. Neuvillette can hear her heartbeat thrumming in the space between them, feel it carrying precious blood through her body to keep her here with him.
“For so long,” she says softly, “All I thought about was the end of my performance. I never considered that I might have to live afterwards. There were… times, both then and after, that I’d dream about just stepping into the sea and letting myself wash away. And — in Poisson, right before everything — I was so close to just giving up. I wanted to.”
Neuvillette knows. He has watched her slip away over the years, and though he had not understood the specifics, it was undeniable instinct that had carried him to her door night after night, holding silent vigil in her parlour while she slept. It is your duty to protect her, he remembers telling Clorinde. It is also your duty to protect her from herself. And she had nodded, grave and determined, pearl rosary in her pocket.
She had betrayed her duty, the morning of that terrible trial, just as Neuvillette had betrayed his. They are still working through the ramifications of that mistake.
Neuvillette steels himself against the flood of guilt, and reaches past the pillows to take Furina into his arms. She goes too easily, melting against him as if he had never brought her harm, as if her blood was not on his hands. Neuvillette buries his face in her hair and prays for salvation.
She smells like his shampoo. She has her own — delicate and richly scented, custom-crafted by Sigewinne — but she seems to prefer using his. Neuvillette prefers it, too. He likes the thought of them smelling the same, matching right down to their very bones.
“But I don’t want that anymore,” Furina says. There is something plaintive in her voice now, bright with determination and hollow with hunger. “I want to be happy. I want to live a life, instead of just the footnote at the end of some… ridiculous tragedy.”
She rests her head on his shoulder, looks up at him with those big blue eyes. Centuries ago, droves of fashion-forward Fontainians had purchased coloured contact lenses in an attempt to resemble their Archon: it had been terribly unsettling for Neuvillette, to look into a stranger’s face and see a mockery of something so familiar. To make eye contact with the real Furina then had been a relief, and that feeling had never quite left, even after the inevitable shortage had brought about some rather strict laws and contact lenses became a prescription-only item.
“Furina,” Neuvillette murmurs, feeling the swell of hope feverish beneath his tongue. “What are you saying?”
She huffs. “I’m saying I want more. After my execution, you said there were things you could do to make me immortal again, if I wanted. You offered.” Insecurity, a moth’s wing passing across an open flame. Somewhere down the street a cat cries out for its dinner. “You haven’t changed your mind… right?”
“Of course not.” The bubble bursts: all Neuvillette can feel is relief, blinding, carrying his body to the ocean floor. “When would you like me to do it? Now? I am assuming you do not wish for me to place a curse on you, but there are other choices — I could imbue you with a certain amount of my power, or, if you did not wish to feel beholden to me, I could—”
Furina puts a hand to his chest and untangles their bodies, laughing through a sheen of tears. “Neuvillette. Stop. Breathe.”
Breathe? What does Neuvillette’s breath matter, when Furina’s may stay steady for eternity? He blinks back purpling spots behind his eyes. “I believe I have forgotten how.”
She tucks her hands into her sleeves — Neuvillette’s nightshirt, though after three weeks of cohabitation he suspects he may have to relinquish ownership of it entirely. “I don’t — I don’t want to live forever,” she says, brittle with hesitation. “But… I like the thought of the first option. We’d be tied together, like we used to be, only this time it would be real. I’d be choosing it, not just having it thrust upon me by some — some sentient chess piece. And besides — I can hardly leave you alone, now, can I?”
It was always real, Neuvillette thinks, though he knows that is not true. He had not come to Fontaine for friendship; he had come for his power, and his pride, and that confounding web of rhetoric she had woven about him like a fishing-net. To return a portion of his Authority to her now, without the stench of divinity or ocean of lies sticky beneath their feet, feels pleasingly poetic.
“Then it shall be done,” he tells her.
Furina’s shoulders slouch, features painted bright with relief, a hidden thread of tension unravelling her back into the bed. She reaches for the tray and nibbles on a slice of bread, letting out a surprised little hum as her teeth break the crust. “This is good. Where did you get it?”
“A small patisserie in the Vasari Passage, near your old apartment. Navia recommend it to me, and given our prior experiences with human businesses, I thought it best to not delay my visit.”
The last time they made plans to visit a restaurant, it had been in the golden days of their partnership, before the prophecy had begun to tighten about them like a noose and they could not get through a single day without arguing. Furina had made it her mission to try every culinary establishment in the country — but the list had been long, and the two of them had been busy, and by the time they reached the latter half fifty years later, every restaurant left had either closed down or sold.
That old pain resurfaces — the shock of mortality, like cold water down Neuvillette’s spine. But Furina, Furina, Furina is going to live on with a piece of his power inside her, just as she always should have.
How far they have come from that first meeting. How well they have grown.
“The passage of time is funny, isn’t it?” Furina, giving voice to Neuvillette’s innermost thoughts. “It seems so long to those in short supply of it. I’m sure eighty years used to seem like a long time to me, when I first became Archon. Now I’ve taken longer than that to read novels.”
“If we are thinking of the same novel, it was a particularly dry text. I still have not progressed past the third chapter.”
“It gets better, I promise. Mmm, this bread is splendid. If you don’t have anything planned tomorrow night, perhaps we could make a soup to go with it. And it would be a good excuse to use that sweet little ladle you made! Where did you put that, by the way? I didn’t see it when I came in.” She glances about the room, as if expecting the ladle to be sitting inside his armoire.
“I gave it to the Traveller. I was not entirely sure what else to do with it…”
“Oh,” Furina says. Her voice is round and blank, but Neuvillette catches a glimpse of her face, carefully tucked-away disappointment, before she turns her cheek into the pillows. His newly-winged heart sinks into the sea. He had not realised she had wanted it.
“I will make another,” he decides. “And I will make it a friend. I found the process surprisingly enjoyable — I believe I would like to continue my foray into ceramics. Would you also like to be sculpted as a sea-beast?”
Furina snuggles back into his shoulder, eyes drifting closed, the last crumbs of her dinner licked from her fingers. She seems suddenly exhausted — centuries spent without a moment of rest have run her energy reserves so shallow that it is a miracle she can make her way out of bed some days.
There are, of course, still days when she cannot. But she will have time, now, to heal from all that has happened without the evisceration of further tragedy. They both will.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she says. “All of it. For now… If I die in the night, you have my full permission to revive me. Alright?”
Neuvillette takes her hand, small and human-soft and scarred, warm to the fingertips with life. Her palm fits perfectly against his own. “Of course,” he says. And then, “Thank you.” I will not let you down again.
Furina does not reply. She is already asleep: half-swallowed by cushions, her nightshirt rumpled around her knees. Neuvillette smooths it down and fishes at the end of the bed for the thick, soft blanket Sedene had knitted for him sixty years ago.
In the darkness, he listens to the sounds of Fontaine through the open window; the clunk-clunk-clunk of gardemeks patrolling the streets, the hissing sigh of a steam-engine releasing a final breath. An orchestra striking up to entertain some upper-class aristocracy in the Quartier Narbonnais. And, far out beyond the city walls, the distant crash of the ocean: Neuvillette’s domain, as it has always been, but no longer the centre of his world.
He has not thought about the future since Furina became mortal, because the thought of a world in which she did not exist had been unbearable, inconceivable. Now, he closes his eyes and lets himself imagine centuries of this: Furina slumbering against his shoulder in a soft bed, night after night until the world is changed and they leave it together, hand in hand as they are now, never to be parted by something as paltry as death.
Furina’s grip on his fingers tightens for a moment, as if somewhere in her sleep she is sharing the same thought. Then she mumbles, and sighs, and tucks her cold feet further under Neuvillette’s leg.
They will still be separated in the morning, beholden to the calls of duty and civilisation. He cannot say he is looking forward to the experience by any means, but he finds an old aching fear has been soothed somewhat. She will come home. She will come home, and she will steal his cufflinks and use up all the hot water and live.
Neuvillette presses his face into Furina’s hair and slips into sleep, ready to meet her again in their dreams.