Archive of Our Own

The day after her mother dies, Jean comes in to the Ordo headquarters very early and manages to get most of the day's paperwork done by noon. She pauses then, when the sun slanting in through her office window rises above her line of sight and its light becomes a diffuse brightness throughout the room instead of a sharp glare against her abandoned teacup, and sets her pen down.

She didn't eat breakfast this morning. Couldn't stand being alone in the house for that long after she woke up. Couldn't bear the thought of preparing a morning meal for herself without setting an extra plate for her mother. Jean has cooked for the both of them since her mother retired; the Gunnhildr family doesn't keep servants. Knights should always be able to feed themselves, and clothe themselves, and care for their own gear.

In the end, Jean takes the pen up again and resumes her work without a visit to the mess hall. Grand Master Varka had told her yesterday to take today off, and tomorrow too, and as many more days as she wanted. Jean doesn't know how to explain to him, or to anyone, that she doesn't want days off. She prefers diving into her work to any other distraction. If she appears in public, she will have to give those explanations, and be surrounded by awkward and uncertain sympathy. Worse yet, she will distract everyone else from their very important work to tend to her grief.

Which should not be anyone else's duty. It is not as if she can imagine anything they could do that would comfort her. The grief is a great hole in her chest, a vast hollow pit. It feels like it has pushed her lungs and heart out of their places, is pressing them now against the bars of her ribs. They're squeezed relentlessly, hopelessly, by that brutal crush. It's too great to speak, to cry, to do anything other than breathe.

Jean works through her usual tea-time with Lisa without incident, for Lisa doubtless thinks she's at home. She gets through most of the paperwork she had allotted to tomorrow, too, before she is interrupted. But an hour or so before her usual working day would end, Jean's door creaks open.

She looks up guiltily, expecting Grand Master Varka there to scold her, or perhaps Kaeya and Lisa, if one of them has figured out she's here. But no one meets her gaze. The door closes again, with a quiet giggle, and Jean has to lean forward a bit to see the familiar red cap sitting atop blond hair.

Covering her mouth before she can blurt out Klee's name, Jean watches her tip-toe away from the door, still giggling even through the hands she has smashed to her own face to muffle them. They continue as Klee tip-toes around Jean's desk, never looking up, and then stop abruptly as she sees Jean's chair pulled out from the desk. Jean watches Klee's face as her gaze sweeps upward, mischief transforming slowly to dismay, until their eyes suddenly meet.

Any other day, Jean would have had to fight back laughter at Klee's suddenly horror-wide eyes. Today, though, she struggles to even paste a smile on.

"Master Jean!" Klee squeaks, fortunately made too breathless by astonishment to squeal it. "I didn't know you were gonna be in here, I'm sorry! Kaeya told me you were at home today.... And I didn't do anything wrong, I promise!"

The last is added, hastily, as Jean hears rapid footsteps in the hallway outside. She takes just a second to bemoan the loss of her privacy, then reaches out and beckons Klee closer. Looking confused, Klee nonetheless follows the wordless instruction, scrambling all the way behind the desk and tucking herself right up against Jean's leg, next to the chair.

The last thing she wants is to get involved in any disciplinary efforts right now. She's too tired for that, too busy trying to breathe through the pressure in her chest to cope with Klee's bewildered and sorrowful apologies as she's locked back into solitary confinement. Whatever she's done this time, it's unlikely that punishment will keep her from doing it again, and Jean can't push that rock up that hill today.

Jean settles a hand over Klee's head, fingers wrapping gently around the curve of it, feeling the warmth of her through the soft velvet of her cap. "Shhhh," she hisses.

"Shhhh," Klee echoes, a small finger over her lips.

The door opens. Noelle comes to a stop in it, her eyes wide. Jean steadily meets her gaze, willing her not to ask the obvious questions.

To give her credit, Noelle recovers quickly and graciously. "I'm sorry to bother you, Master Jean, but have you seen Klee?"

"No," Jean says.

She sees Noelle's eyes travel to the arm that disappears behind her desk, the one gently cupping Klee so close. But Noelle simply nods and bobs her a curtsey. "Thank you, Master Jean. I am sorry again for bothering you."

The door clicks closed behind her, and her feet tap quickly away down the hall again. Klee breathes out a gusty sigh of relief.

"Thank you, Master Jean," she says, grabbing Jean around the middle in a hug. Jean curls her arm further, hugging her back. "Thank you! I really didn't do anything wrong, really, honest."

"I would suggest that you go find a task that needs to be done and do it," Jean tells her, reluctantly pulling her arm away. "One that has nothing to do with explosions."

"Yes, Master Jean!" Klee says with a sloppy salute, relief written across her face. She scrambles for the door, pausing with her hand reaching up for the knob to turn back and look at Jean. "I'm really sorry about your mom."

Jean draws in a breath to reply, or tries to, but the hollow pressure only tightens in her chest. She finds that she lacks an answer, can't find the words. It's one thing to politely demur the sympathies of the sisters who had taken her mother's body away yesterday evening, another thing entirely to respond appropriately to the artless sincerity of one so young.

Fortunately, Klee doesn't seem to expect an answer. She just opens the door, slips through it, and pulls it closed behind her. It doesn't quite latch all the way, but she doesn't seem to notice, presumably bounding away down the hall. Jean can't make herself get up out of the chair to close it the last half-inch. She's too busy trying to remember how to breathe again.

Strangely, she already misses the soft pressure of Klee's head and hand tucked against her thigh. The warmth emanating from her, the extra body heat of a Pyro user, is the first thing Jean has felt since yesterday that was strong enough for her to actually take notice. She can still feel the ghost of the hug, the fading impression of small arms around her waist.

Now that two people know she's here, it won't be long until she's interrupted. Jean bends her head back down to her work.

***

To her utter lack of surprise, Kaeya appears in her doorway next.

The sky is darkening by now, its blue not so much deepening as graying into shadow. Through her window, she can just see one of the tall windmills of Mondstadt, turning from a bright beacon of the winds to a grim, looming silhouette as the shadows lengthen below it.

He's given her enough time to finish tomorrow's paperwork, at least, bar what won't even sprout upon her desk until the morning. By now Jean is on to less time-sensitive work, the necessary processing of failed experiment reports and library requisitions that Jean would herself have put deadlines on, given the option, but which Grand Master Varka always very casually tells her to get done whenever she gets around to it. She's getting around to it now.

Jean finishes scanning the last few paragraphs of one of Sucrose's lab reports, signs it carefully at the bottom, and puts it in her outbox before she looks at Kaeya. He's still in the doorway, leaning against the frame. Despite the casual pose and the ever-ready smile, she imagines that she can sense the worry underneath.

"You weren't planning to stay up all night doing paperwork, I hope, Master of Knights?"

Something about the title makes Jean flinch. She can see him catch that, too, his eyes twitching down to where her shoulders had jerked upward before she brought them back into line again.

"Not all night," she says. Her voice sounds flat to her own ears, all the weariness she's feeling laid bare in it. She is too tired, also, to correct it.

"Just part of it, then. You'd better not let the Grand Master know you were planning that, Jean," and now Kaeya steps forward, flipping the coin he keeps ever-ready one more time in his hand and then making it vanish in that way he does that Jean's never been able to follow. "He wanted you to take some time to yourself. He'll be upset enough if he knows you were here all day."

There's relief in his rare use of her unadorned first name. It doesn't feel disrespectful. Instead it frees her, lets her shrug off the mantle of Master of Knights, Grand Master Varka's second-in-command, and makes her lapses in self-control excusable. It makes her feel far less guilty that Kaeya is clearly stepping in for her sake when their relationship isn't framed in knightly ranks.

"He doesn't know yet?" Jean asks, though she's not surprised by that, either. Kaeya likes to keep even unimportant information close to the chest if he thinks there's any chance he can use it.

"He doesn't, and he won't," Kaeya says, and his smile is turning into a smirk. "As long as you let me buy you dinner. I'm sure you don't want to go home after doing all that work and cook."

She doesn't, Jean thinks, and it's only as she thinks it that she hears her stomach growl and realizes that she's hungry. It's not the eager anticipation of a well-earned meal that she's used to, just another dull emptiness inside her, a tedious need that she doesn't particularly want to put in any effort to fulfill.

Despite the obvious minor blackmail, it's that which decides her. Kaeya's proposal will mean no effort. Jean caps her pen, sets it aside, and rises from her desk. "I can agree to that."

Kaeya at least is aware that she wouldn't want to actually eat out anywhere, simply ducking in at the Cat's Tail to pick up a pizza that he'd clearly ordered ahead of time. He comes out with a bottle as well, but Jean elects not to comment. It's not as if she has to drink.

Expecting to return back to her own empty house, she misses a single step when Kaeya turns down a different street, but recognizes it immediately as the route to his own apartment. Her first instinct is to protest, but she has no energy for it. What was driving her throughout the workday is gone, like it's all been drained away into the emptiness in her chest. That gap has grown so heavy, she wonders if she'll be able to swallow around it.

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Her body knows that it needs food, even if she can't find it in herself to take any pleasure about it. She would feel guilty about that, since she so rarely gets to have Diona's pizza, and Kaeya has ordered it with all her favorite toppings. But she doesn't have room right now for guilt. Which is likely why, when Kaeya opens the bottle and hands her a half-full glass, she goes ahead and drinks without complaint.

It's as sweet as she expected, but stronger, with an undertaste that tells her that this is absolutely not her own preferred dandelion wine. She can't stop the initial splutter.

"Death After Noon?" she guesses, looking up at Kaeya. It's not something she's had before, aside from a taste so long ago that she doesn't remember the flavor.

He chuckles, leaning back with his own glass in hand, one foot hooked around a leg of the table to keep his tilted chair from completely tipping. "If there's any good time for you to get honestly drunk for once, it's here and now. And then you can say that you've tried it."

There's a glint of concern in his eye, even though he's still wearing a devil-may-care smirk of deliberate temptation. Jean realizes that he doesn't know how to deal with this any more than she does. She can't really call his and Diluc's loss, with its far different circumstances, any kind of practice.

Jean raises the glass to her lips again and tosses back the rest of its contents. She grimaces as she swallows, but this time she doesn't gag or splutter.

Kaeya pats his hands together a couple of times in mocking applause, but it's a cursory gesture. "You're supposed to savor it, Jean. It's wine, not whiskey."

She holds the glass out to him. "I'll savor the next glass."

Grinning wider, with just a hint of relief behind it, Kaeya brings his chair upright with a clatter and leans forward to pick up the bottle.

Once they finish off the pizza, they migrate to the front room of the apartment, Kaeya piling their dishes into an empty bucket and waving off her offer to pause and help wash them. He has his own fireplace, cleverly connected by a grate to a larger chimney that serves several apartments, and he presses another glass on her while he fights with the tinderbox to get a fire going in it.

They both settle in comfortable armchairs in front of it, the bottle on the table between them. Somehow the glasses had gotten left in the kitchen, but Kaeya takes a sip and then nudges the bottle towards her, and Jean, three glasses in already, decides that the alcohol is enough of an antiseptic for her to share.

"Do you know how Sister Barbara is holding up?" he asks after they've exchanged it back and forth a few times, so casually that it makes the weight of the question even more obvious.

"I don't," Jean tells him. "I haven't seen her. She didn't come with the other sisters to collect- the body."

And Jean hasn't been up to the church yet. There's no reason for her to, the sisters had assured her. They took clothing, and a few of her mother's jewelry pieces that Jean thought held the most sentimental value for her; they'll dress her and prepare her for the funeral tomorrow. Jean knows she doesn't want to see that process.

She's not sure whether or not Barbara will want to see it, to be involved, to look upon her mother's face one last time in private before the funeral. That's how little Jean knows her sister. All she can do is hope that, whatever Barbara wants, the sisters will arrange it. She thinks she can trust the Church that much.

"Hmm," Kaeya says, and drops the subject. He and Diluc's relationship had shattered over the death of their father, Jean knows, though she doesn't know the details--she's never pried, and neither of them have shared of their own volition. She doesn't press him on it now, either.

He hands her the bottle again, and she doesn't hand it back this time. Instead she just keeps pouring wine down her throat, as if she can use it to fill the yawning pit inside of her, until there's only a half-measure sloshing around in the bottom. Even then she still feels empty.

Before she can finish it off entirely, Kaeya looks her way and does a double-take at the sight of the bottle, then reaches over and pries it out of her hand. "So even you can't resist Death After Noon, eh? If I'd known how well you'd take to it, I would've gotten two bottles."

"I'd be throwing up by now if you'd done that," Jean says, muzzily aware of the nausea that's been stirring in her gut. "I hadn't eaten today until the pizza, so I probably shouldn't have drunk as much as I have already."

Then her gut stirs again, and she lurches up out of the chair with her hand over her mouth. Her intention is to make a run for the kitchen, but instead she folds gracelessly down onto her knees and throws up all over the rug in front of the fire.

Kaeya swears, somewhere above and behind her. Then she feels his hand on her shoulder, cool even through her clothing against her wine-flushed skin. She moans miserably, doubling over a second time, and his hand moves to card through her hair, brushing it back away from her face so she won't get vomit on it.

He holds her hair back until her stomach's empty, rubbing slow circles on her back with his other hand. Even when she's done retching, his hand keeps moving, the chill of it soothing, and Jean stays there with her elbows on her thighs and her face in her hands. Her cheeks feel damp where her fingers are pressed against them.

When she finally straightens up, she's inarguably crying. Not sobbing, just sniffling, a low-level constant leakage of tears and snot and misery. It doesn't even make her feel better, because she still doesn't feel sad, just empty, and none of it reduces the vastness of that empty feeling one bit. She still can't make the tears stop coming.

"I'm sorry," Kaeya says, helping her to her feet, still rubbing her back. "I didn't know you hadn't eaten, but I should've known you didn't have the tolerance."

"That wasn't your fault," Jean tells him through the tears, her voice shaking, red-faced with shame at the way she can't stop blubbering. "That was a lapse in my own judgement. You were merely trying to be kind."

"And not doing the best job I could have," Kaeya says, ruefully, but he stops apologizing and starts to guide her gently out of the room instead. "Come on, let's get some water into you, and off to bed you go."

Jean doesn't fight him when he pours three cups of water into her, accompanied by a small bowl of plain rice to soothe her unsettled stomach. Nor does she protest, though she thinks she should, when he steers her into his bedroom next. It's not as if she wants to be seen walking home in this state. She's still crying.

Kaeya shushes her gently when she tries to apologize. "It's all right, Jean. Even the Master of Knights is allowed to feel things sometimes, you know."

"That's the thing," she says, her words slurred and stumbling, trying to explain to him. Trying to tell him about the hollowness. "I don't feel anything. Except tired. And like- like there's a hole in my chest where I should feel something. I don't know why I'm crying, except maybe that I know I should have more feelings about this."

"Oh, that's familiar," Kaeya murmurs, so quietly she thinks she wasn't supposed to hear, and then gives her a wry half-smile. "There's no should or shouldn't about it, Jean. It isn't about benchmarks. Though in your case, I'm sure there's more than you're letting yourself know about just yet."

He pulls her into a half-hug, his arm slung over her shoulder. Jean turns into it, wraps both her arms tight around him, buries her face into his shoulder. After a moment of standing frozen, Kaeya puts his other arm around her and embraces her fully. He holds her for several moments longer than she'd expected either of them to tolerate, and then Jean's embarrassment overwhelms her desire for contact sufficiently for her to pull away. Kaeya seems relieved, but keeps a hand on her shoulder as he directs her into his bedroom.

The bed is freshly-made, the sheets clean and new and smelling faintly of cecelia flowers. Jean pulls them up over her shoulders, sinks into the mattress, and buries her face in the pillow, letting it absorb her tears and less poetic liquids. She's vaguely aware of Kaeya standing in the doorway for a little while, just a silent shadow watching over her. Then, as she's drifting away, he turns and closes the door behind him.

***

When she wakes up in the morning, Kaeya is gone from his apartment, along with the rug she's soiled and the empty bottle. There's a plate on the table piled with eggs and pancakes and bacon, and a glass of water beside it. A folded piece of paper is trapped half-under the napkin.

Jean,

Take the day off. Seriously. If you left any paperwork in your wake at all, I'll take care of it, promise. You know Grand Master Varka will send you right off if you show up anyway.

You can stay here as long as you want, but I think a walk would be a good idea. Or you could wander up to the church and talk to Barbara. The two of you can probably use it.

- Kaeya

He's signed his name with the same huge letters and elaborate flourish he uses on paperwork he knows she's supposed to sign as well, taking up most of the space allotted for her own signature just to annoy her. Jean snorts at that, more because she knows he did it to make her laugh than because it's actually funny. Then she digs into the breakfast.

She recoils from the idea of going to talk to Barbara. Kaeya means well, she knows that. But he doesn't really understand how it is between them. It's not bitter acrimony, not like Kaeya and his brother, at least not on Jean's side. It's just... distance. Neither of them know the other. And Jean still feels too empty inside to find the capacity in herself to reach out and bridge the gap at this moment.

A walk it is, then.

***

Monstadt's rolling hills are beautiful today. More beautiful than they should be, something small and bitter inside her whispers. Jean determinedly ignores it. Just because her mother is dead and her life upended doesn't mean the whole world should, or would, reflect it.

Butterflies still dart and linger among the flowers. Squirrels run up and down and between the trees, and boars graze beneath them. Birds scatter in front of her as she walks the familiar path towards the beach, and the white bluffs that skirt the trail rise up on either side of her. In the Whispering Woods, under the canopy of the trees, the blazing brightness of the morning sun is muted, so that only thin beams of sunlight cut between the leaves.

The yawning hollow feeling feels less vast, here, looking at the beauty all around her. She can at least breathe more easily around it. But her heart still feels like it's being compressed, as if it's held tight in someone's fist, and there's a heaviness to it at odds with the empty lightness of the pit in her chest. That weight keeps trickling up her throat, thickening into a lump there. After swallowing proves useless, Jean lets it linger.

As she steps out of the woods into the open area around Starfall Lake, she catches sight of a flash of red by the water. Jean reaches to her sword as her very first instinct. But then the red figure moves and turns, and she realizes that it's not a hilichurl.

"Master Jean!" Amber exclaims, jogging towards her.

She's holding flowers in her hand, Jean sees as she comes closer. Calla lilies, at least a bouquet's worth.

"Flower-picking on duty, Amber?" she asks, meaning for it to come out gently chiding. The hoarseness of her own voice manages to surprise her.

"What? Oh." Amber looks down at the flowers in her hands, then up at Jean, then takes a deep breath and thrusts the bouquet out at her. "These are for you."

"Oh," Jean says, reaching out without thinking to take them. She still can't master her tone. "Thank you?"

"Do you remember when my grandfather disappeared?" Amber asks. Her words seem to burst out of her, almost falling over each other in her anxious rush. "And right after. You brought me calla lilies almost every day, from your mother's garden. Because they mean love for someone who's still gone. I didn't want to get any out of your garden, that would be stealing, but I knew some grew here, so I thought I'd get them while I was on patrol. I meant to bring them back to Mondstadt later and put them in the cathedral, but since you're here anyway, I thought I should give them to you."

Jean does remember, suddenly and like a hidden bud unfurling. She remembers Amber, only twelve years old and wracked with grief and confusion, folding herself away into every hidden space she could find in the Ordo headquarters to cry quietly with anyone seeing. Jean, only just made captain, had found Amber in her office cabinet, and drawn from her the explanation that some of the young knights-in-training had been taunting her about the rumor that her grandfather had defected. Jean's own memory of that period is of tracking down every one of those trainees and having them disciplined for cruelty.

But it's clear that Amber remembers it differently. Unlike Jean, she hadn't forgotten about Jean's clumsy attempt to make her feel better with a few limp handfuls of flowers. Calla lilies don't even mean 'love for someone you're missing'; Jean had invented that to cover her awkwardness the first time, when Amber had looked at her with bewilderment. The only reason she'd picked them was because beetles had eaten her mother's snapdragons, and red was even then very clearly Amber's favorite color.

Tears rise in her eyes, and Jean prays that she won't start sniffling uncontrollably. Her control, however, seems to be better when she's sober, and she's able to blink them back, readjusting her grip on the lilies and smiling, if stiffly, at Amber.

"I remember. I hadn't realized that it had made such an impression on you. Your kindness is admirable, Amber, as always."

"You';re always working so hard, Master Jean," Amber says, standing up straighter in front of her. "I just want to help you out where I can. I know flowers aren't really helping, but I'm not authorized for paperwork or anything, so...."

"They do help," Jean says, and despite her choked voice she still manages to sound earnest. "They remind me that there are beautiful things in this world, even when it's difficult to see them."

"Oh. Well. Good!" Amber blurts out, her face reddening. She starts to dart forward, then pauses, her arms awkwardly half-extended. "Is it all right if I hug you?"

It would be wrong to rebuff Amber's willing kindness. And it will mean that Amber isn't looking her in the eye while she once again has to master her face. Not sure she can speak again without it coming out on a sob, Jean simply extends her arms as well and nods.

Amber resumes her forward rush, slamming into Jean hard enough that Jean has to brace against it, and wraps her arms around her. Jean hugs her back, careful of the flowers. Like Klee, Amber's Pyro vision makes her even warmer than a regular human, a living brazier pouring warmth into Jean alongside the comfort. Jean breathes in deeply a few times, swallows, and does her best to look composed before Amber squeezes her one last time and takes a step back.

"I can walk with you to the beach, if you want," she says. "So if you run into any hilichurls or slimes on the way, you don't have to deal with them."

There, at last, Jean is able to draw a line. "Thank you, Amber, but that won't be necessary. I can handle them myself, though I appreciate the offer. And I would hate to take you from your patrol route."

"Haha, right," Amber says, flashing her a smile. "I guess since you have the flowers now, I should go ahead and pick that back up. I won't bother you any longer."

And then she's off in a rush, moving with the boundless speed and energy that Jean has always envied, even when she was Amber's age herself. Jean watches her go until she vanishes in the forest, then starts on down the road towards the beach.

The wind picks up as she passes the little lake, with its decrepit statue. It plays with her hair, trying to tug a few strands out of her ponytail, and makes the blossoms on the lilies flutter. Jean takes a deep breath as it sweeps around her, carrying the scent of far-away dandelions, and finds as she walks on that the lump in her throat is a little less than it was before.

***

By the time Jean returns to Mondstadt that afternoon, she feels like she's in control of her composure. There's a dread growing in her, though, as she approaches her house. Until yesterday, it was her mother's house, but now the Gunnhildr estate descends onto the eldest child. At some point she will be expected to redecorate, to rearrange everything to her liking instead of her mother's. She'll be able to get rid of the old red and brown hangings she's never liked, and set the kitchen up to suit her own cooking style and preferences.

Jean isn't ready to think about that right now. Knowing that she has to go back into the house to dress for the funeral is bad enough. It won't be until sunset, and she has several hours, but if she's forbidden from the Ordo Headquarters, it's not as if there's anything else to do.

The familiar roof is just coming into view when an equally familiar purple-clad figure steps into Jean's line of sight. "Jean! Just the woman I was looking for."

Pulling her gaze away from the house, Jean frowns at Lisa. "Is something wrong at the Ordo?"

She's secretly hoping for a yes. If there's something that requires her there, then she can go and throw herself into it, distract herself with whatever emergency has arisen until sunset actually comes. But she's only disappointed, not surprised, when Lisa shakes her head.

"No, everything's running quite smoothly there. Not that we don't miss your efficiency as Master of Knights, but the Grand Master can do his own job for a few days, don't you think?"

She moves quickly to fall in with Jean, looping her arm through Jean's elbow and then pulling Jean's arm tight against her side. Her touch isn't as warm as Klee's or Amber's, but there's an immediate little crackle of static electricity that Jean has come to find familiar. It's comforting in that familiarity, grounding her in the moment and making it impossible for her thoughts to drift back to the vast and unsteady future work of stripping her mother out of the Gunnhildr house.

"But I did have a problem I thought you might be able to help me with," Lisa goes on, walking arm-in-arm with Jean. She lets Jean set the pace, neither dragging her ahead nor, as would be more expected from her, lagging back. "I don't have anything in my wardrobe suitable for this evening, and it's too short notice to have something made for it. Now, I know you've told me you have a great many outfits at home for different occasions, and since you and are more or less of a size, I thought I might be able to borrow something off you."

They aren't, in several areas, 'of a size,' though Jean supposes they're close enough that Lisa could squeeze herself into some of Jean's clothes. And that's not even the most transparent part of the excuse. But Jean, despite feeling certain she should be ashamed, snatches at it regardless of the flimsiness. She would rather swallow the lie than go into the house alone.

"Of course," she says. "You're welcome to anything that you think will suit."

"Lovely," Lisa says, with another of those fond smiles, and squeezes Jean's arm.

She doesn't detach from Jean as they enter the house, and Jean doesn't pull away either, even though it would make it easier to hold the door and show Lisa up the stairs. She has this irrational fear that the moment Lisa lets go of her, her thoughts will float away again, and she won't be able to think of a thing as she walks through the house except how she'll be expected to change it. To make it modern and unfamiliar, as if scrubbing it out and repainting the walls will scrub away and paint over the new emptiness within it.

But when she does finally have to let go, when she opens her wardrobe so both of them can go through it, Lisa keeps up such a steady rush of light chatter that Jean's thoughts can't wander too far away. It's not even as if either of them are all that inclined to fashion. Jean's only interest has ever been in the propriety of her dress, not whether it's flattering. Lisa knows very well what flatters her, but she chooses her outfits primarily to attract and distract, using her appearance to ensure she's underestimated by her foes.

All the same, Jean enters into the conversation with a will, clinging to it like a lifeline. Talking about cuts and hemlines and lacing may not be interesting, exactly, but Lisa can make any conversation come alive. When she explains how a particular corset can change the neckline of a dress, Jean listens attentively, keeping her own observations about how the corset's boning is like a very light armor in mind. With the clothing in their hands as they discuss it, it's something else to focus herself upon, to keep her thoughts from drifting to places where she isn't ready for them to go.

The light in the room is fading before Jean knows it, and she realizes with some shock that they have just spent at least two hours talking about clothes. They change quickly into their respective outfits, Jean pulling the laces tight on the dress Lisa's wearing so that she doesn't spill out of the front, Lisa delicately rearranging the onyx-and-silver pendant around Jean's neck. The faint static of her fingers is even more palpable against Jean's bare skin.

When they're finished, their Visions are the only spots of color on either of them. Lisa holds her arm out to Jean again as they reach the door.

"This is a political occasion, isn't it, since the Gunnhildr Clan is involved?" she asks quietly. "If you'd be so kind as to be my escort, I can run a little interference for you. Ask me whether I need anything if it becomes too much, and I'll whine about how tired I am and drag you away for a little while."

Once again, Jean feels herself start to tear up and has to blink the impulse back. "I shall keep that in mind, though I hope that I won't need it."

"You know how to ask if you do," Lisa says, smiling, and then they exit Jean's house together, leaving it once again empty and alone.

***

The funeral is a solemn affair, and a well-populated one. Jean is called forward at one point to deliver an eulogy that her mother had made her start working on two years ago and she's had memorized for a year and a half. The whole time she scans the crowd, looking for a particular face.

Finally she finds Barbara near a pillar in the back, another sister standing beside her with an arm around her shoulder. Her face is white and her eyes are rimmed with red, but she's not crying at the moment. It's not as if Jean's prim and formal eulogy even mentions her.

Afterwards, the receiving line is just as political as Lisa had predicted. Jean knew it would be, has always known, but she had been so overwhelmed that she hadn't thought about it until Lisa's reminder. She's deeply grateful for the librarian's presence at her side. Diluc and Grand Master Varka circulate around the sanctuary, making themselves tempting targets for the kind of base power-seekers who might otherwise try for an angle with Jean at her own mother's funeral.

There are a few nonetheless, men and women who have clearly learned of the Ordo rumor that the Grand Master is grooming Jean as his successor and hope that they'll have a better in if they get to her early enough. Jean has to keep her spine straight and her teeth gritted through a few too many toadying speeches about how much her mother meant to everyone from people she knows her mother would have disdained to speak more than three words to.

After a conversation with the Fatui ambassador that leaves Jean surprised she didn't crack her own molars, Lisa looks at her face and loudly declares herself exhausted without Jean ever having to use their code. The next dignitary in line starts to protest, but Diluc swoops in beside Jean as she starts to retreat, smiling politely at the woman as she turns her attention to him.

He gives Jean a quick, solemn nod, and Jean nods back to him in gratitude before sweeping Lisa away.

Jean conducts her solicitously out of the sanctuary, taking comfort once again from the grounding tingle of static where her arm is wrapped supportively around Lisa's upper back. The church sisters are more than happy to point the two of them to a back room where Lisa can rest. It's small and private, at the top of the stairs that lead down to the sisters' quarters, warmed and lit by a brazier well away from the bookshelves along the walls. The only furniture is a small reading table and two chairs. Jean drops into one with unceremonious relief.

"I'm grateful that no one expected Barbara to participate in that," Jean says, realizing only after she says it that this is a subject Lisa will hardly be comfortable making conversation about.

Now that she's out of that line, though, all she can think about is Barbara's white, tear-stained face, and how conspicuously absent it had been during the reception. She is seized, suddenly, with an impulse that goes against all her thoughts this morning. Barbara has to be somewhere in the cathedral. Jean can at least offer her a moment of sympathy, whether or not Barbara chooses to accept it.

"I'm going to find her," she says to Lisa. "I'll come back here when I'm finished, if you'd like to stay, but don't feel obliged to remain if you have better things to do."

"I'll wait here, don't you worry," Lisa says, eyeing the shelves and humming thoughtfully. "They do have some interesting books. But I promise not to intrude."

Pushing herself out of her chair is a struggle. The weariness she's only just been able to stave off all day has returned in force. Jean feels like she's trying to lift herself up in full plate armor, with an extra fifty pounds strapped on top of it to boot. But she walks forward with her head high, refusing to let her feet drag, out the door and down the narrow steps.

Nearly at the bottom, she hears sobbing from the left-hand door closest to the stairs. Jean hesitates, then pushes herself forward. As she pauses in front of the door, hand raised to knock, she notices that her fist is shaking slightly.

She knocks anyway. "Barbara?"

The sobbing cuts off, and she can hear the noisy sniffling of someone quickly trying to clear out their sinuses. Silence follows, long enough that Jean begins to wonder if she's being ignored. At last, though, the door swings open.

Barbara's face is red now, but there's still a wan paleness beneath. Her eyes are teary, whites bloodshot, the skin around them tear-smeared and raw. As Jean looks down to meet her gaze, she wonders if she looks equally a sight.

"Wh- why am I crying, when you're not?" Barbara blurts.

Apparently she doesn't.

"That's my knightly training," Jean says, and doesn't know if Barbara can tell that it's the truth. Her composure has been trained into her, first by her mother, later by her officers. A knight must always seem calm, and while that might have broken a few times earlier, she's kept it firmly in mind tonight.

"Yeah," Barbara says, swiping her sleeve over her eyes. "I'm okay. You don't need to check on me, um, Master Jean."

Jean's heart spasms in her chest. She doesn't speak to Barbara often, and that's by intent. It always throws her off-balance.

"Can I come in?" she asks.

"If you want to."

Barbara steps back, and Jean enters, looking around her sister's room. It's small, but not as small as she'd once feared, reading about nuns' cells in some dry informative book. There's a bed in one corner, covered in plush blankets, and shelves and drawers and a dresser, and a disorganized writing-desk. Every place the wall isn't covered with furniture, it's decorated instead--colorful sketches and paintings of various nature scenes, blue skies and ocean waves and sunflowers, intermixed with posters of girls and young women in flashy dresses and cute, childish hairstyles.

The covers on the bed are already ruffled as if there has been a weight atop them, and Barbara sits back down on it. Unsure if she'd be welcome beside her, Jean glances about, then pulls out the chair under the desk.

"What did you want?" Barbara asks. She's trying to sound respectful, Jean can tell, but her voice is too raw and ragged to manage it. Her hands are folded in her lap, and her fingers twist anxiously around each other.

"I wanted to see if you were all right," Jean says, inadequate to actually explain her true desires. The idea of offering Barbara comfort seems petty now, selfish. She can recognize that what she'd actually wanted was the comfort of Barbara accepting it.

"I'm fine," Barbara says, ducking her head as she lies. "I wasn't as close to Mother as you were, so I can't be doing worse than you are."

That's a defense Jean is puzzled as how to penetrate. She sits for a moment in silence, looking at Barbara's drooping pigtails. Finally, for lack of anything else to say, she offers, "I cried too. Yesterday night, and this morning. I simply have more training than you in concealing my feelings at formal occasions."

"Oh," Barbara says. And then, "This isn't- you don't have to be formal with me."

Tears flood Jean's eyes as if Barbara's Hydro powers have summoned them, although Jean knows her sister would never do any such thing. Instead, it's as if her words were a release, the secret signal that some hidden switch inside her had been waiting for. She swallows against the increasingly sticky feeling in her throat.

"You don't have to have lived with Mother to mourn her," she says, and remembers Kaeya's words of the night before. "There's no should or shouldn't when it comes to feelings. You don't have to measure yourself against me."

"I know," Barbara says, her voice muffled as she swipes at her face again with her sleeve. Then she looks up again at Jean. With that gentle kindness with which Jean has seen her handle an injured child, or a direly wounded young knight, she says, "It's all right for you to cry too."

The stickiness in Jean's throat turns into a lump, and she can't choke back a sob. Now she's the one who has to duck her head and look away, as tears begin again to fall. It's real crying, this time, not the incessant drunken leaking of the previous night. Sobs tear out of her, and her shoulders shake, and she has to wipe her face with her own sleeve.

A handkerchief is thrust into her line of vision, and Jean looks up to see Barbara standing in front of her. She hadn't even heard her sister move. Taking the handkerchief, she mouths her thanks.

Eventually the sobs die off, faster than she'd thought they would, and she's crying almost silently again. Barbara is sniffling too, but eventually her voice, even rawer and hoarser than before, rises--not in statement or question, but in soft, uneven song. Jean doesn't recognize what she's singing, which is certainly not one of the traditional ballads of the Mondstadt bards, but then, her sister's talent has always been unique. Only half the words are audible, but Jean catches snatches of the lyrics: sweet lines about rain, and clouds passing, and turning your face up to the sun.

Barbara's voice fades away in what seems to be the middle of a verse. Looking up, Jean sees that she's slumped back against the wall, her eyes closed, breathing taking on the long slow rhythms of sleep.

Jean stands and walks over, looking down at her for a long moment. Then she reaches down and rearranges her, careful and gentle as she can. It must be good enough, because Barbara doesn't wake as Jean tucks her into bed. She pries the handkerchief from Barbara's hand, folds it together with the one her sister had lent to her, and sets them both at the end of the desk.

As she makes her weary way back up the narrow stair, Jean thinks of her sister's small room, and the vast, echoing emptiness of the house. It isn't a question to ask right now, she thinks. There would be no kindness in plucking Barbara up from among her friends and comrades in the Church, only to leave her alone all day and half the night in that home while Jean does the hard work of the Master of Knights. But maybe someday, when the house is redecorated and rearranged, when they're both past crying, Jean can at least invite her in.

For now, she thinks, maybe she should send Barbara some calla lilies. There's no need to attach a false meaning to them, but they would have meaning on their own.

***

Lisa is still waiting in the little room, but she's not alone. Kaeya is leaning against the table, flipping a coin, while Amber, in the other chair, is hiding a yawn behind her hand. She jerks upright, flushing, when the door opens, while Lisa looks up from her book and smiles. Kaeya just catches his coin in his hand and tucks it away.

"Ready to go home, Jean?" he asks, taking a step away from the table. "Everything's over. The Grand Master and Sister Rosaria booted everyone out pretty much as soon as they noticed you were gone."

"Oh," Jean says, flushing. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was a funeral, not a party. We're only still around to walk you home."

"There's no need for three people to do that," Jean protests.

"I still need to return your clothes," Lisa says, sensibly. "And when Kaeya asked me whether you'd had dinner, I did have to tell him that I'd distracted you from it.."

"Kaeya had me run down and put in an order at the Cat's Tail," Amber volunteers, blinking her sleepiness away as soon as she's reminded of the existence of food. She is a teenager, after all. "Noelle's supposed to pick it up when it's ready."

"Only pizza, no alcohol," Kaeya puts in.

"I tried to talk him into sticky honey roast, but he said that we couldn't be sure Good Hunter would still be open by the time you were ready to leave. As if they wouldn't have stayed open for Master Jean!"

"That wouldn't be a very fair thing to ask them to do," Jean says, letting her officer voice loose on autopilot while she tries to grapple with the renewed clenching in her chest. "Their staff deserves to get off and go home on time. We would have to have a very important reason to ask them otherwise. There was no need to go to all this trouble," she adds, finally managing to find her own words.

"It isn't any trouble," Lisa says, smiling up at her with that same fond, sad-edged look. "You're our Master of Knights. We're here to help you out."

"Yeah!" Amber adds. "You do so much for us every day. It's only fair that you let us do something for you, too."

"Thank you," Jean says, and she'd thought she'd cried herself out downstairs, but she's still choking up. "I'm not sure what I did to deserve your kindness, but I am grateful for it."

"It doesn't matter if you deserve it or not," Kaeya says. "We're friends, aren't we? If you don't mind me getting too unprofessional."

"We are," Jean agrees, and some of the clenching in her chest eases, as if the hollow in there has shrunk another little bit.

She lets them walk her home, Lisa's static on her left and Kaeya's chill on her right and Amber's warmth dashing ahead. The lights are shining in her windows when they arrive, and she hesitates for a moment, but Kaeya walks on up to the front door and holds it open for them with no sign of concern. After a second, Jean dredges a mention of Noelle out of her weary memory.

The house is warm when they enter, and far cleaner and tidier than when they left it, even the pictures on the walls perfectly straight. The calla lilies that Amber had given her, set aside when she and Lisa entered, have been arranged beautifully in a vase and given pride of place on a table beside the stairs. She can hear a familiar voice mumbling sleepily somewhere in the back of the house.

"Klee should be in bed by now," Jean says, following that voice into the kitchen.

"i'm very sorry, Master Jean," Noelle says, looking up from the beautifully-plated pizzas on the table and flushing faintly. "But she wanted badly to go and find you and Captain Alberich, and I was afraid that she would sneak out if no one was keeping an eye on her. So I told her that she could come with me as long as she was very careful and did everything I asked."

Klee, half-awake, blinks up at Jean. "I'm doing an important job. I'm keeping the pizzas warm."

"Vital work," Kaeya assures her, swooping around the table to snatch up her cap and ruffle her hair. She whines a protest, and he plays keep-away with her cap for only a moment before popping it back in place. "I think you should get a reward for working so hard. Don't you think so, Master of Knights?"

"I do," Jean agrees. She can't quite smile, even now, but she can feel fondness welling up from somewhere deep within as she watches Klee and Kaeya play. "I believe that some pizza would be a fair reward for such a valiant young knight. As well as for my escorts."

Amber, whose stomach had growled audibly as soon as the aroma of warm pizza hit their noses, looks tremendously relieved. Lisa just smiles and finds herself a chair. Noelle is quick to cut into the pizza, serving out the first slice to Jean as soon as she seats herself.

The kitchen is abuzz with the energy of six different Visions, and with the voices and activity of their bearers. Though there are no open windows, a breeze sweeps briefly through the room, tugging at Amber's headband and the brim of Lisa's hat, Noelle's apron and Kaeya's cloak. Amber is scolding Kaeya for snatching the second plate before Lisa could take it. Lisa is smiling benignly at him while purple electricity buzzes around the Vision at her throat. Klee has taken her pizza under the table and refuses to come out.

Outside the kitchen, the house is still empty and echoing. And inside of Jean's chest, the hollow numbness still seems to crush any happiness that dares arise. But there is kindness and friendship in this one room, filling it to almost overflowing, and she can feel it start to seep into her from without. It's not enough to fill that hollow space, not yet. Jean trusts, though, that it will be.