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There is a dream that Furina oft has. It had begun fifty years, give or take, after she had become the “Hydro Archon,” and it persists well into her life after she had put all of that behind. To call it a dream, however, may be a little misleading or even incorrect; make no mistake that this was, is, and will be nothing more than a nightmare. Something to fear.
In it, she stands upon the stage—an action she has done countless times. She is fully dressed in her normal garb (most of the time; sometimes it is costumes of characters she has played recently, but it is never just her herself), and the audience before her is seemingly both empty and overflowing at once.
Furina can do nothing but stand there. She can do nothing but stand and peer out across the faceless faces of a sometimes willing, sometimes unruly audience. She cannot find her voice, which becomes an exceptional problem when the audience bores of her doing nothing whatsoever. She cannot quell them, calm her people and tell them everything is alright.
“You are nothing but a fake!” they cry. It is the same nonsense, and it truly is nonsense even if it seems real within the dream and even, at times, in the waking world, every time. “Do something! Do something about all of this already! A true Archon would—but you are nothing, nothing at all, who can do nothing but watch as her people suffer more than she does! Begone! Begone already!”
They throw things at her feet, sometimes at her specifically. Dozens of items, trash and garbage, bounce off of her. They pile higher and higher around her, and soon, it begins to swallow her.
She cannot even cry. Furina stands frozen before the crowd that she can no longer see, a smile permanently etched onto her face. Her cheeks hurt.
Somewhat unceremoniously, she opens her eyes and stares at the darkened ceiling. For several long, pregnant moments, Furina feels nothing but an icy chill. She realizes she’s sweating, cool against her warm skin. She does not move. She continues to stare at the ornate ceiling, as she has done every time she’s had this dream—this nightmare. A dreadful thing, this dream. But it’s true. It surely must be true. She has done nothing… She never will be able to do anything…
She is nothing but a fake, as they said, as they always say. Her people suffer more than she. Her people are more righteous, more beautiful, more deserving than she.
Something—no, someone—stirs next to her. Her heart begins to race. This is someone meant to kill her because of their dissatisfaction, no? She squeezes her eyes shut tight. She waits.
A hand hovers above her face.
She waits some more.
But her expected death does not come. Rather, a gentle, warm hand touches her cheek; slender fingers wipe away the tears she yet sheds.
“Furina?” says Neuvillette, quiet, unassuming, and concerned.
For the briefest of moments, she considers turning away. She always does consider this option. The thought of hurting her beloved, the one who has been at her side before, now, and forevermore, however, keeps her from doing so. She tells herself that by throwing her arms around his neck and burying herself into Neuvillette’s larger frame, pressing her face against his chest and weeping openly until she has no more tears to weep for the night, she is helping him—that she is soothing his concern.
She isn’t opening up. She isn’t baring herself to him, no matter how much she wants to. No, no. Even as she curls her fingers in his nightshirt so tightly that her knuckles turn white and her hands shake, she is doing this for him, not for herself. Furina flinches once at the arms around her, pulling her in closer; she flinches again at the fingers that curl through her hair, and one more time at the first kiss upon her head.
What of suffering? she thinks. What of heeding the cries of ‘begone’? What of deserving, and of… what of…
But then morning comes, and she has fallen asleep, and so has he, tangled up in one another’s embrace, Furina’s cheeks stained with dry tears, and a light drizzle outside.