Chapter Text
La Signora walks into the Doctor's lab, rudely slamming her unauthorized hands on the table top. Luckily, there are no dangerous chemicals on said table top, but he does get some soy sauce on his shirt for his trouble.
"Dottore," she announces, with all the flair of a (frankly unstoppable) woman out to get what she wants. "I want a child."
Theta, the youngest of the Segments, can only gape at her in shock.
La Signora waits for him, rather impatiently, considering the bomb she just dropped on him.
Theta eventually manages to regain (some of) his bearings. "You- what- how did you even-" he sputtered. The only members of the Fatui, Harbinger or otherwise, who have authorized access to waltz without care into the Il Dottore's laboratory at Zapolyarny Palace are Pierro and the Balladeer. One of the access features is facial recognition that scans the bone structure as well as the exterior face. Unless La Signora suddenly gained the ability to completely change her body's makeup and mimic others' (and as the Second, Dottore would know), there was no way she could have gotten in. The access is Harbinger-proof.
"Balladeer walked in with me past the access point," Signora says. "He got distracted with one of you."
Well. Theta was not as familiar with the god puppet as most of his Segments were, but he could still say that was typical of him. He probably even did it on purpose, just to make Theta suffer.
"Back to the point," Signora stands up straight. "I am in dire want of a child, and you are the only person who can give that to me."
Theta can't deal with this. He's only seventeen. He's in the time of his life where he'd only just finished his formal schooling. He hasn't even taken a single introductory class for the Akademiya yet!
His distress must be visible on his face (and probably everywhere else on his body), because Signora rolls her eyes and moves to amend. "Through science, of course. I do not want a drop of your blood in my bloodline." She looks at him distastefully.
Theta's shoulders slump in relief. Good. He isn't going to become a teenage father.
Except. "Um," he starts, and resists a flinch when Signora's eyes narrow in on him. "I haven't learned how to make people from scratch yet, artificial or otherwise." He explains nervously. "I'm, uh, a Segment from before I- we attended the Akademiya."
At this, Signora rolls her eyes again and sighs deeply, as if the world's grievances were finally getting to her. Theta can't help but feel mildly offended. Only mildly, though, because he hasn't gained any self-esteem yet. "I know that," she says patiently, with all the patience of someone who was about to lose it. "I am simply telling you this so that you can tell the other you's."
Oh. That made sense. "Wait, but didn't you just say that one of the others is outside right now, as in you passed him going inside here," Theta says, but Signora is already turning on her heel and walking out of the laboratory.
"Hey, wait-" The resounding door slam is enough to make some of the vials on the shelves drop to the floor.
Theta stares despondently at the mixed chemicals forming on the ground and sighs deeply. Being the youngest of the Harbingers is the most difficult job ever.
"So," Omega, the original and oldest of the Segments, says. "You want me to create an organic human child using your DNA as well as that of your dead lover's?"
Signora nods. She pushes forward the two small bottles containing Rostam's blood and hairs respectively. At least she knows how to separate her samples, Omega thinks.
"And may I ask why you possess the DNA of your lover who died five hundred years ago?"
Signora scowls. "It was common practice for Monstadtian maidens to collect the natural things that their love interest leaves behind," she says haughtily, as if that explained anything. "in hopes that by destroying them before anyone else who had interest in that person found them, they would only have affections for the girl who held the ashes of those remains. It was also a common tradition before the wedding, as it symbolized only having affections for one's wife until even after death."
Okay. Omega keeps his thoughts on that particular practice to himself, as well as the question as to why Signora still kept some of the DNA instead of destroying them.
"I see," he says lightly. He is not sure if he actually sees. "And may I ask just why you want a child?" The Fatui Harbingers are many things, but most of them are not qualified child caretakers. The one that publicly runs an orphanage is assumed by default to be a cold and merciless trainer rather than a caretaker, which, isn't too far from the truth, except Arlecchino does care for her children. The one that has actual extended experience with children does not make this public as to not put his family in danger.
Signora's eye darkens, and her manicured fingers start tapping against the polished wooden table in a rhythmical manner. It is clear that she is losing her patience, as she is wont to do, but is maintaining politeness for the sake of getting what she wants, fully knowing that the Il Dottore would be the only person who could give her that, and because she knows that if she pissed him off he'd sic Kunikuzushi on her public residence and have him deface it.
Signora's public estate really goes through a lot.
"Let's just say I had some revelations," she stops her rhythmical tapping and straightens. "So. Are you agreeing to do this or not?" She demands.
She was about to lose it, politeness and public estate be damned. Omega leans forward, carefully avoiding the bottles lest he break them and unleash her rage upon him. "Perhaps. Human creation is not difficult in my line of work, after all." He hums. "What's in it for me?"
A satisfied smile forms on the Fair Lady's face. She removes another set of bottles from her person- this time, instead of containing human DNA, they contained various godly parts such as chemical purple fluid and a very familiar memory card, albeit crudely made in its likeness. She dangles each bottle from between her fingers, the glass making lovely clinking noises. "Let's say I won a bet with the Balladeer, and he gave me some... samples, of highly essential functions in his body, in return. Perhaps with it you could make that Segment you've been meaning to.."
An all-too sharp grin makes Omega's face very terrifying indeed. "You have yourself a deal."
The Fair Lady's revelations come to her on a cold, dreary day.
In Snezhnaya, the days are always cold and dreary, especially to one who wasn't born and raised in the weather, but on that particular day it was especially cold, and especially dreary.
On some rare days, La Signora finds herself missing her homeland. The weather of Mondstadt was always mild, even in summer, when the heat was sticky against the skin, but never enough to cause more than barely a sweat to break out on one's forehead, and the winter, when it was cool enough to always wear layers, but never more than two, unless you dared to go into Dragonspine in the dead of winter.
In Mondstadt, breezes were constant, and brought along with them the scent of wine and joy, no matter the occasion. It rarely rained even in spring, so the sun was always comfortably warm and the winds were always light and gentle, abundant in the stories it carried no matter where they came.
In Snezhnaya, winds were a curse. No one wanted the biting winds around, because they only ever meant a storm.
The life of a Harbinger is that one could not abandon their duties no matter what, so La Signora regretfully puts down the idea of taking a visit to the Land of Freedom as a passing tourist, and turns back to her indomitable stack of paperwork.
Next to her desk was a window that overlooked the west courtyard of Zapolyarny Palace, which happened to contain the break rooms of the non-combatant Fatui. Of course, it was not open air, so she couldn't actually see what was going on inside, but interesting things still happened outside. One time, she spotted a couple broadcasting their lovers' quarrel out to the entirety of the west courtyard, loud and raucous enough that even the reinforced windows could not keep out their sound, but Signora had been amused enough by it not to go down and punish the agents.
This time, there was no lovers' quarrel or anything of the sort (a shame, for she loved drama to the point that she was often called the biggest drama queen in the Fatui), however there was an unknown man standing at one of the entrances. He was wearing normal winter clothes rather than an issued uniform, and she could recognize the make and pastel colors of Mondstadtian clothing no matter how far away it was. He was looking straight at somewhere else, and Signora followed his gaze to find..
A mother and her child.
The mother was one of Signora's own off-duty Cicin Mages, probably working as a non-combatant due to some injury or whatnot, smiling gleefully as she picked her small, dumpling-like child up and spun her around in the air, causing the child to kick and squirm, but Signora could easily discern that it was out of happiness rather than discomfort. The young child kept patting their tiny gloved hands against their mother's masked face, seemingly curious about the strange mask that covered her eyes.
Inexplicably, Signora felt something in her chest clench.
Back then, she had been any normal maiden. She wanted to become someone who would always have her head up high no matter the circumstances, she wanted to love and be loved as fiercely as the flames that burned in her hands, and most of all, she wanted to eventually settle down and have a family with that one person who would be her eternity.
After the Cataclysm, when the Mondstadt that she had known and loved had fallen and burned to the ground, it had taken with it her hopes and dreams.
(And from the ashes, a phoenix rose, reborn.)
Signora has not thought of children for a long time.
She knows they exist, obviously, with loving mothers and fathers and perhaps equally loving siblings in a warm family home. But it had been a long time since she had considered herself, in any daydream, part of a family home, just like that.
She knew as well that families weren't always the romanticized and typical image that society liked to think was the only kind of family. She knew that families could be broken and dysfunctional, with an absent father and a depressed mother and kids falling into disrepair, or perhaps could only have one parent and their child, or perhaps could not even be entirely linked by blood at all. She has seen groups of friends, close and loving and caring enough that they couldn't be anything but a family, lovers who didn't need a child to become a family on their own.
She knew, too, that the Tsaritsa fancied herself and her Harbingers a family. She also knew that Her Majesty's hope and daydream wasn't too far from the truth.
(They were a dysfunctional family; a clown who never smiled, a doctor who did more harm than good, an angel with blood staining her white wings, a soldier who was too honorable for the kind of work he did, an ancient politician with a nearly faux love for family, a disgraced divinity whose fire created dissonance with the electricity in his veins, a blank-eyed marionette who was just as much of a puppet as her creations were, a woman of great confidence who hated the sound of her own voice, a man who knew nothing else but to take and unfamiliar with the concept of giving, a knight whose silver was stained black and rusted from her dishonorable battles yet with her head still high, a child who never knew what to do in his own body, and a lady just trying to hold on to her ideal of reality.
They were dysfunctional, running on hatred and fumes and spite against all the people who told them that they couldn't be this or that simply because they were them, bent and twisted and thinned and frayed yet never, not even for a second, broken.)
From then on, wherever she went, it was like a thin filter of shade had been removed from her eyes. The children were everywhere.
Before, when she had simply ignored every peasant around her, finding no reason to pay attention to useless persons, now she was noticing the young ones from the corner of her eye like they were a beam of light in complete darkness. When she visited cities and towns in Snezhnaya, sitting loftily on her carriage, she saw the awed looks on the kids' faces, how some of them would often lift their heads up ever so slightly from their bows to sneak curious peeks at her, how big and innocent their eyes were, how untainted their spirits were.
She spotted children eating meals with their family through the windows of their homes, darting between adults' legs to chase after each other, playing nonsensical games in hidden corners behind houses and balancing at the top of bricked roofs. Somehow, it was like when Rostam had passed- everything she hardly paid attention to back then, simple things part of simple every day life, suddenly reminded her of him. No matter where she went, she could see him, him, him in every corner of the world. The lavender of his hair in flower garnish. The green of his eyes in every leaf shining underneath the sun. The immense strength he possessed in every bodybuilder, every heavy item she would have a fleeting thought of him carrying.
And suddenly, she longed.
Longed for a child of her own. One that would take away her pains and worries and fears, even just for a little while. One whom she could take care of, whom she could rely to make her happy in even the darkest of days, one with big green eyes and a gap-toothed smile and a voice all too reminiscent of his claiming that he'd protect her, forever and ever.
(Where was he when she needed to be saved? Where was he when she needed him the most?)
(it was unfair unfair unfair unfair UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR)
Signora takes a deep breath of winter frost, and longs.
It is March 21st, a little over three months after the Deal, when the Eighth of the Eleven Fatui Harbingers, La Signora the Fair Lady, holds her baby for the first time.
She has Rostam's lavender color, fine locks already present on her tiny little head, and his green eyes, a color of bamboo forest only possible through the presence of komorebi- which, she had learned through Kunikuzushi, was Inazuman for sunlight, specifically, sunlight filtering through leaves in the trees. Despite it all, the girl still looks damnably like her; the slightly doe, slightly almond shape of her eyes, the lips curled upwards into an ever-present smile, they were all Rostam's- but the fair complexion, the fine bridge of her nose- those were all Signora's.
No. They were Rosalyne's.
Rosalyne-Kruzchka Lohefalter smiles with tears in her eyes, her face bare to the light of the sun streaming in from the open windows, as she plays delicately with her daughter's tiny, chubby little fingers. The girl keeps giggling, a sweet smile on her oh-so-precious face that makes the corners of her eyes crinkle until her irises sparkle, the same way that Rostam always smiled back when he was young.
She smells like spring- like hope, and new beginnings, and everything that comes with the season of flowers.
"Noelle," she whispers. Noelle, meaning "Day of the Frost Queen", for the girl who was first thought of in the season of Her Majesty's birthday. Noelle, for the girl who was created in winter, and was born in spring. Noelle curls her tiny little pink around Rosalyne's own. "My love, you will be the happiest girl in this world. I promise you."
(You make a pinky promise, you keep it all your life
You break a pinky promise, I throw you on the ice
The cold will kill the pinky that once betrayed your friend,
The frost will freeze your tongue off so you never lie again.)
Rosalyne takes a deep breath of spring flowers, and lives.