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"And your friend — that Lawrence girl?" her mother said, her voice pausing when she'd watched Jean's face — do something, certainly, though she wasn't sure what. It was harder to tell what her body did when it came to the minutiae of feeling, not action; she certainly never had this problem when she was standing on the training field, her sword in hand.
"My colleague," she said after a moment: a correction, though she did her best to make it sound unlike one. "Eula, Captain of the Reconnaissance Company?"
"I heard she cut ties with her family."
"I haven't asked," said Jean, though her mother hadn't, either. Not really. It had been a glancing kind of remark, type that brushed over the armor without actually leaving a mark, and that was Kaeya's specialty, not Jean's; you'd see the slope of the blade as it approached and think nothing of it, knowing that it'd be only the flat of the blade that came close to you, not the edge, and then just as it came close he'd twist his wrist and the edge would pierce into your metal with a graceful pivot. Jean's strikes, though — all of those land clean and true. "It didn't seem appropriate to pry."
"You two used to be close, didn't you? You took dancing lessons together."
"We did," said Jean, for they had. Kaeya and Diluc had been there, too, and Barbara, for a few lessons, before the instructor complained that she was too young to be graceful and advised that she join them in a few years instead.
But they had never been close. Eula had been very different from Jean even as a child, and as adults, they had their rank and hierarchy to divide them even where their nobility did not.
"Was it Varka who admitted her into the Knights?"
"It was me," said Jean.
"Hm," said Frederica Gunnhildr, and set her cup down to pass, as always, duty to her daughter.
"Kaeya," said Jean. "Would you happen to know where Eula is?"
He was leaning over the edge of her desk, waiting for her — he'd stand often in her absence, even if he was examining papers, but he was preoccupied now with the bemused regard of the soot-covered, shabby-looking Baron Bunny on her desk (one that looked vaguely reminiscent of Jumpty Dumpty, the most recent addition to Klee's repentant gifts following her time-out with Amber this time), his fingers caught on its ear. But he was still looking at her, even as his fingers were caught on the creature's ear, and he'd raised his eyebrows at her in question.
"I heard she had a mission in Dragonspine this morning," said Kaeya. He leaned his weight upwards, dropping his hand back to his side as he stood. "Something about charting a few new caverns … but she should be back soon. Is something wrong, Acting Grandmaster?"
"Nothing's wrong," said Jean, and then, "It's a personal matter," which were not contrary at all but often sounded like they were in her mouth. She crossed the length of the room to meet him there, and he moved aside so she could pass by him and sit in her seat, if she'd like, but she stayed at the periphery of the chair next to him.
"Ah," he said, and then, faintly sly, "It's rare to see you at such a loss, Master Jean."
"It's my mother," she said, though she suspected he must at least know: he'd been the first that she brought home on invitation, formal invitation for him alone — it had felt inexplicably different from when her mother had said, and Crepus' boys are coming? when she had still been a child, her mother's and you'll have Kaeya over for dinner, of course, her expectation devoid of presumption because of the sheer truth that Jean, of course, would say yes; the way she bent the knee to the Gunnhildr name had long preceded her induction into the Knights. He'd liked it, at least. Or at least she'd thought he'd had. There were times that he could grow unreadable, but she knew at the very least that he hadn't been out of sorts, in her family estate as an adult, which had seemed to take him aback more than it had her. "She'd like to have her over."
"She's always been fond of her," said Kaeya. "I'd thought. She seems her type."
"Do you think so?" Jean asked, surprised. Her mother's opinions of the company that she had kept had always been moderate: on one hand there was expectation, and then on the other hand was the simple truth that it was not in Mondstadtian nature — or at least the nature of any Mondstadtian who wasn't a traditional Lawrence — to discriminate against others. They were a nation of wanderers and outsiders, and the Gunnhildrs were their knights: it wouldn't do otherwise. "Because of her claymore?"
It was Kaeya's turn to be surprised. "Because of her verve," he said, which made sense to Jean afterward in its own way.
Her mother had that kind of temperament. In many ways they were diametrically opposed: or, rather, parallel, two swords hanging next to each other in the armory in their scabbards. Forged from the same steel and never to cross, only draw themselves parallel to each other in unison.
As a girl she had followed her mother, but she had rarely understood her; as Acting Grandmaster of the Knights of Favonius now, she considered that her mother might feel the same in reverse.
Her mother did like that: knights with spirit. It was knights like Varka who fit that stereotype, or Diluc in his short-lived tenure in their ranks — knights like Eula and Amber. It was different with Jean, who could be diffident from a place of calm self-understanding but never hotheaded, and different with Jean, who had ascended to her position with dreams of maintaining the peace of Mondstadt rather than pursuing her own legacy.
"Do you think she'll accept?" asked Jean.
"You're worried about that?"
"It just seems improper," Jean said. She wasn't self-conscious, but she felt something similar to it. An apprehension had taken root in her stomach, although it wasn't a breach of the conduct outlined in the Knights of Favonius' Handbook, first to fifth editions included. "Considering our positions."
Kaeya looked at her for a moment. "She respects you a great deal," he said. "I think she'd be flattered by your invitation."
"Flattered seems like a strong word, doesn't it," said Jean, curious.
"You took a chance on her that most wouldn't, considering her background." His hand brushed a strand of wayward hair back into its place behind his ear, his gaze briefly sliding away from her before it returned again. She met it steadily. "She understands that."
"It's not that I want to pressure her," she said, frowning. "I would never think of it."
Kaeya laughed, his shoulders shaking as his head slipped forward. Jean watched him. Her gloved fingers twitched faintly. When he straightened up again, amusement still rippling outward from his face, his fingers reached outward, off to his side and beyond her vision, to take the Baron Bunny off of her desk.
Jean held out her hands unthinkingly. He gave it to her.
There was a note attached to its head. A sloppy apology from Klee, complete with a colorful depiction of herself crying.
I'm sorry, it said, the apostrophe crooked. A sad face. A faint, fond exasperation flickered in her chest.
"I don't think you ever would," said Kaeya.
"Then?"
"She admires your character," Kaeya said. He looked at the note himself. Watching her read it, perhaps. "And she's often alone, I think, especially with Amber's recent work occupying her."
She heard the reprimand where there was none. Of course there was none. The Knights of Favonius was not a social club, and it had its own duties and missions to answer to above the bonds of the knights that kept it there. And if it were one, Jean would not be the one put in charge. She was accustomed to being alone, and unsure of how to remedy solitude even when she knew it existed — and Kaeya's intelligence was so rarely ever wrong — on account of the distance between her and other people; Jean, lingering on the edges of conversation, hovering at the threshold of a room, unsure of how to intercede while new orders waited in her hand.
Kaeya wouldn't have said it as a dig: she knew his character well enough, even when they were children, to know that. But that was the thing, wasn't it; that Kaeya knew how to navigate through interactions with other people in ways that Jean herself felt like an outsider to. Even estranged, he and Diluc still felt closer than she seemed with Barbara, sisters though they were.
"You're inviting her?" said Kaeya, even though she hadn't said anything back yet. Perhaps she hadn't needed to. His tone of voice was curious, not nudging.
She didn't have to, she knew.
But: "I should," she said.
His expression changed slightly. It wasn't an emotion he expressed, but he had drawn himself into that way that he held himself in the face of an absolute issued by Jean — the expression he wore when he was listening to her make a decision on a matter, which often fooled her into thinking that she'd been more finite than she was. He leaned towards her slightly, the whole graceful line of his body clear in its intent to respond, but then he paused — and turned, and she turned — and there was a figure stepping through the front entrance of the Knights of Favonius visible from the open door of her office, the edges of her clothing faintly damp with snowmelt.
"Eula," Jean called. The figure paused.
Eula, of course, was a perfect dinner guest — familiar with etiquette the way her mother was, and preferential — though her turns of speech were sometimes explosive — to the more streamlined manner of the Knights of Favonius, which forewent the more frivolous parts of etiquette in favor of good-natured practicality. She had thought that Eula might show up in one of her gowns, but she'd arrived in her uniform, as Jean had, the emblem of the Knights of Favonius painted over her tie.
Jean cut into her meal carefully, her hands steady on the silver cutlery. Eula's laughter echoed in the room, echoed by her mother's lower voice. It hovered between familiarity and unfamiliarity to Jean: she knew the voice, but not the sound. It struck her that Eula, like Kaeya, was good at being around her mother in ways that Jean was not. It had struck her mother too.
"It was a challenge that I couldn't refuse," Eula was saying, glancing at Jean as she spoke to her mother. "It was the Acting Grandmaster herself, after all. But I was surprised." And this part to Jean herself: "You normally draw a clear line between personal and professional matters. Is that not why you accepted me into the Knights of Favonius on my own merit?"
Her mother faintly smiled. She was looking at Jean. "A Gunnhildr and Mondstadt's Knights of Favonius are intertwined," said Frederica. "There is no such distinction."