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He holds on to her happiness. He has to. His fingers cling to it tightly, for they have nothing else to hold.
If she’s left him, and she doesn’t get to be happy, what does that mean for them both? He can’t force his company on her. In their four hundred years of partnership, Neuvillette has used force against Furina exactly once- and it was the worst mistake he’d ever made in his life.
He can only watch from a distance, balanced carefully on the throne she’d left behind and struggling to understand how she’d sat in it without fracturing. Or more- without fracturing to the point that others would notice. It is an uncomfortable, shaky seat that humans like to shove at as if they are children, all testing to see whether or not they can make him topple.
He understands more of the way that she acted, the more that he is confronted by their increasingly unreasonable demands without her there as a buffer. He wonders more over how she could love them so deeply when they seem to have no caring of their own to share.
And the job is much more difficult, without Furina there. He hadn’t realized just how much she had handled before she left. He thought that she’d handed more duties over to him than she actually did; and the ones that she’d kept for herself had been the ones she’d been shielding him from. The ones that came with arrogant expectations and demands that make his dragon bristle with rage.
Not that that was an uncommon feeling, lately. Not that his dragon had ever stopped being angry since Neuvillette took part in that trial. Not that Neuvillette wasn’t reminded, by the hour, of how foolish he was to have treated their treasure so poorly, to have forced her away.
To go from being in a partnership built on mutual trust and understanding to this… it is an understatement to call it unpleasant. Neuvillette doesn’t have the words to express the full weight of the pain that he hides with dedication to his role. For so long, he’d taken the fact that he wasn’t alone for granted. Now he knows what being alone is really like.
So he holds on to her happiness. He finds joy in the fact that she’s found a new lease on life. He clings to the idea of her leaving her pain behind.
Even if it means she leaves him, too…. He can’t bring himself to prevent it.
He can only hope that it will mean that one day she will come back to him in joy, and not in pain.