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They say that time can heal everything. Ha. Neuvillette wishes that someone would say that to his face, so they can take the full brunt of his displeasure.
Time doesn’t heal anything. It just makes the aching more distant and thoughts of it less, so you’re able to more easily push aside how you’re hurting. Neuvillette has lived through millennium.
He has never healed from Furina’s loss.
He has grown colder, more distant with the people of Fontaine, now. There are no more sunshine smiles or teasing laughter to draw his dragon out of the cave it sleeps in. There is no more reason to open his heart, if he even still has one.
He suspects that he doesn’t. If you were to ask him, he could tell you the second its chambers stopped. It was the exact same second when Furina’s chest no longer rose with her breaths.
He’d loved the people of Fontaine once, he thinks. He’d loved them because of who they were, but… he had also loved them in part because Furina loved them. Now that she is gone, it’s as though she took his ability to love with her. Anymore, all he feels for the people of Fontaine is a distant indifference. Like his emotions were washed pale, all color gone.
He protects them because Furina would want him to protect them. Most days he truly feels this makes him a dragon with his hoard. None of the golden souls that rest within his grasp mean that much to him. They are his; that is all. It is enough that he would burn to ash the hand that tries to reach for them with intent of theft or harm. He hopes that his protection, unfeeling as it is, is still enough to make Furina proud.
He lives a life that is bitterly aware that Dragon Sovereigns only have one true mate all their lives. If they lose them, they’re gone; the Sovereign will never have another. He knows this, just as he knows that even if their bond is incomplete: the Sovereign will feel the severeness of that loss every minute of every day for the rest of their existence.
Furina hadn’t been a Sovereign, so she had been able to find her happiness elsewhere. The pain of her choice is lesser now that the loss of her is so much worse. It is her descendants, anymore, that are able to draw real emotion from him. They make him feel like he is less of an open, eternally bleeding wound. They, especially, have his protection.
Protecting them is the best way he has to spend his time, what with the endless amounts he seems to have of it.
He wonders sometimes when his body will give up, and he will be able to chase after the soul of his mate, wherever she has gone. He’s long stopped thinking of it as something to avoid. He’s heard that others simply begin to erode. He suspects… But no. There is always something new he needs to protect Fontaine from.
He lives, for now.
He longs for the day when he doesn’t.
(When that day finally comes, Furina is waiting for him.
And suddenly everything that came before is worth it.)