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Wriothesley had never been a man for metaphors. He liked his facts clear, his tea dark, and his sentences brief. The world, in his mind, should be navigated like a map in crisp black ink—no smudges, no detours, no flourishes. Laws, walls, fists—he understood those things. They built order. They had weight. They did not vanish the moment you reached to hold them.
But then there was Neuvillette.
Neuvillette, with his voice like stormlight pressed into velvet. Neuvillette, who did not just walk through the world, but listened to it, translated it, belonged to it in some inhuman, aching way Wriothesley had never learned how to name. And when it rained—oh, when it rained, it was as if the heavens leaned in to kiss his knuckles. As if the world itself missed him, mourned him, bent for him.
It was raining now.
Of course it was.
Because Neuvillette was upset, and Wriothesley didn’t know why, and that made his chest feel too tight, like he'd swallowed an hourglass and every grain of unspoken worry had collected in his ribs.
So he waited. He waited outside the Opera Epiclese, where the rain slid down the marble like breath fogging glass, and he tilted his head back and let it run through his hair, let it drip from his jaw. If the Iudex was the kind of man who needed quiet, Wriothesley could be quiet. If he needed space, he’d give it. If he needed him—well. That was the problem, wasn’t it?
He didn’t know what he was allowed to offer.
When the door finally opened, Neuvillette emerged like a vision carved from the storm. No umbrella or coat. Just his usual robes clinging to him in places Wriothesley tried very hard not to notice, silver hair soaked and strung like river-thread down his back. His expression unreadable. His eyes—gods, his eyes were still glowing faintly, like sorrow made visible.
Wriothesley stepped forward without thinking. His voice came out lower than he meant.
“You’re gonna catch cold like that.”
Neuvillette blinked slowly, as if returning from a world Wriothesley could not touch. “I do not get colds.”
Wriothesley huffed. “Right. Forgot. Rain incarnate and all that.”
Neuvillette’s mouth didn’t twitch, but something in his gaze softened—fractionally. And in that fraction, Wriothesley felt himself shatter a little. Just a pinch. Just enough.
They stood in silence. The rain curved around them.
Finally, Wriothesley said, “It’s loud, today.”
He meant the sky. He meant the sorrow. He meant you.
Neuvillette tilted his head. “It is.”
Wriothesley wanted to ask what had made it so, but something in Neuvillette’s posture told him not to. Not yet. Instead, he tried something else. Something foolish. Something tender.
“…Do you think you could teach me how to speak to it?”
Neuvillette turned to look at him fully now. Wriothesley met his eyes without flinching.
“You wish to learn to speak to the rain?”
Wriothesley nodded, sheepish. “You always seem to know what it’s saying. I figure… maybe I should try to listen too.”
Neuvillette regarded him in that impossible way of his, like he was not just observing, but witnessing. As if Wriothesley’s soul had poked out from beneath his skin and Neuvillette had caught it, cradled it, questioned it. It made his stomach twist, made his fingers clench, made something fragile rattle in his throat.
He expected to be laughed at. He wasn’t.
Instead, Neuvillette turned his face back to the sky. The rain misted against his cheeks like a benediction. When he spoke, it was slow and quiet and gentle.
“Then you must be patient. The rain is not a language you learn by force.”
Wriothesley swallowed. “So… not like learning a new martial art.”
Neuvillette gave the barest shake of his head. “Not quite. The rain does not speak in words, not always. It speaks in weight. In rhythm and restraint.”
“And sometimes,” he added, “it speaks only to itself.”
Wriothesley shifted on his feet, trying to puzzle through that. “How did you learn, then?”
“I was born of it,” Neuvillette said simply. “I do not recall a time I did not understand.”
Wriothesley blew out a breath. “That’s not fair.”
Neuvillette did not smile, but the corners of his eyes creased faintly. “No. It isn’t.”
Another pause. Another hush that didn’t feel like emptiness. The world was full of sound—footsteps echoing faintly through the square, the high call of a gull circling near the water’s edge, the patter of rain against carved stone and braided hair. And then, Neuvillette spoke again.
“But I can teach you how to listen.”
Wriothesley looked up.
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Wriothesley blinked water from his lashes. “Alright. What’s the first step?”
Neuvillette was quiet for a long time. Then, softly:
“You must start by being willing to hear what you might not like.”
Wriothesley felt something clench in his chest, then release.
“Okay,” he said.
The rain kept falling, not in sheets now, but in threads—fine and silver, like the world had exhaled and forgotten how to stop weeping. It soaked the collar of Wriothesley’s coat and darkened the cuffs of his gloves, but he did not move. Didn’t fidget. Didn’t scowl. He only looked at Neuvillette with something like quiet reverence tucked behind his usual calm. It felt strange, letting silence linger this long. Stranger still that it did not feel uncomfortable.
Neuvillette’s eyes were closed again. He looked at peace, or something akin to it. The stillness of an ocean floor after a storm, perhaps. Wriothesley had never been good at metaphors, but he was beginning to understand that the man before him was not built for literalness. That the language of the rain was not spoken in nouns, but in gestures. Posture. Listening.
Still, Wriothesley wasn’t sure how to listen when the world felt like this—fragile. Mournful. Like if he breathed too loud, he might scare it into silence.
But Neuvillette had told him to begin. So he tried.
The first thing he noticed was the quiet. Not silence. No. There was too much life in the air for that. The wind moved. The water licked at stone. A distant bell rang from some courtroom tower far behind them. But underneath all that, there was quiet—not as absence, but as presence. A fullness. Like the world was pausing mid-sentence, waiting to see if he’d speak next.
He didn’t.
He waited.
And something in him cracked open. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t obvious. It was like the unclenching of a fist that hadn’t realized it had been tight for years. He took a breath, and it felt different. Not just in his lungs, but in his throat, in the way the air curled around his tongue. Like he was tasting something he hadn’t noticed before.
“The rain doesn’t lie,” Neuvillette said quietly.
Wriothesley startled slightly—he hadn’t realized Neuvillette had opened his eyes again.
“It may conceal. It may hesitate. But it does not lie.”
Wriothesley frowned, not in disagreement, but in concentration. “I’m not sure I know how to hear the truth without twisting it into something else.”
Neuvillette turned toward him, just slightly. “Most don’t. That is why they only hear thunder, not mourning. Why they run for cover instead of listening.”
Wriothesley exhaled a quiet laugh. “So what you’re saying is, I’ve been interrupting the sky my whole life.”
“Not interrupting,” Neuvillette said gently. “Just… assuming it wasn’t speaking to you.”
The words hit deeper than they had any right to.
Wriothesley looked down at his boots, water darkening the leather, pooling in the grooves between each stone on the terrace. He'd never been much for reflection, at least not the obvious kind. He left that to others—Sigewinne, usually, or Clorinde when she was in the right mood. He preferred motion to thought. Muscle to metaphor. But here, in the hush between Neuvillette’s words, it was impossible not to hear the weight of everything he hadn’t let himself consider.
How long had he lived this way? Reacting. Moving. Keeping the walls around his heart like the ones around the Fortress—thick, fortified, full of ghosts. How long had it been since someone looked at him not as a relic of the underworld, but as someone worth teaching?
Too long.
Neuvillette’s gaze softened as if he could sense the direction of his thoughts. Perhaps he could.
“I believe you are more fluent than you realize,” he said. “You simply use a different dialect.”
Wriothesley huffed. “Of the rain?”
“Of sorrow.”
He stiffened.
“That obvious, huh?”
Wriothesley meant it as a joke. Or at least the outline of one, the shape of a grin he didn’t quite wear. He thought the weight of his words might slant into humor, tip away from the edge of something too exposed.
But Neuvillette didn’t laugh. He didn’t soften or flinch either. He only looked at him—truly looked at him, in that way he had, like his gaze wasn’t resting on Wriothesley but in him, like a tide slowly seeping into the hollows of a cavern long closed.
“Yes,” Neuvillette said quietly. “But that does not make it a fault.”
That shut Wriothesley up.
He felt the words hit the back of his throat and settle there, like stones in a well. Not heavy in a cruel way, but true. Unflinching. The kind of truth that didn’t stab, just pressed—a weight to be carried, not a wound to be nursed.
He’d been expecting something else, maybe. Pity. Sympathy. Distance. The kind of mild observation most people gave when they talked about his past, his title, his reputation. But Neuvillette offered none of that. No feigned gentleness, or performance of sorrow. Just presence.
That, somehow, was harder to bear.
So Wriothesley looked away.
Wriothesley wasn’t sure why that word, of all things, landed the way it did. Sorrow. Said without judgment, without pity, but with the same gravity Neuvillette gave to the law, to the sea, to the sky itself. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t even really a question. It was… a recognition. A naming of something Wriothesley had never dared to call by name.
He laughed, but it came out wrong—tight in the throat, like the sound didn’t know whether it wanted to be humor or grief. “That obvious,” he repeated, quieter.
The sky above was still grayed out, overcast and humming. Rain still threaded down over the rooftops, dripped from every carved lip of the court’s marble facade, gathered in his sleeves. But it no longer felt heavy. If anything, it felt attentive—like a conversation that had not yet ended.
He listened again.
He tried.
The rhythm of the rain had changed. The cadence was softer now, gentler, like a hand brushing through hair or over the back of a shoulder. Like something patient. Something breathing.
Wriothesley exhaled.
Neuvillette didn’t press. Didn’t offer sympathy. He only waited.
And Wriothesley—who had built his life on knowing how to endure the weight of waiting—folded, just a little.
“…It’s not that I mind carrying it,” he said, not looking at him. “It’s just that… no one ever taught me what to do with it.”
He flexed his fingers, watching the water trickle down the stone steps beyond. The sound of it was soft, like a memory you didn’t realize you had until someone else spoke it aloud.
“I figured if I kept moving, it wouldn’t settle in. If I just… fixed things. Punched things. Did something with my hands, then the rest of me wouldn’t have time to ache.”
Neuvillette’s voice was a quiet ripple beside him. “Did it work?”
Wriothesley didn’t answer right away. He was thinking—actually thinking, not just reacting, not just fending off the world like it was an opponent to be outmaneuvered.
Eventually, he said, “No. Not really. But it helped me forget for a while.”
He risked a glance sideways.
Neuvillette was watching him again, calm as ever, but his expression held something softer than serenity. It was not indulgence. It was not distance. It was a kind of nearness Wriothesley didn’t know how to quantify. Like being seen not only for who you were, but for all the versions of yourself you buried.
“It is difficult,” Neuvillette said, “to carry grief in a place that punishes vulnerability.”
Wriothesley gave a low hum. “You mean the Fortress?”
“I mean Fontaine.”
That surprised him.
Neuvillette continued, gaze lifted now to the misted sky. “We live in a city of performance. Of justice, yes, but also spectacle. We are taught to build our sadness into something palatable. To turn it into poetry, or comedy, or nothing at all.”
Wriothesley tilted his head. “Didn’t realize the Chief Justice was a cynic.”
Neuvillette let out the barest breath of a laugh. “Not cynicism. Observation.”
Then, after a moment: “I have seen too many people drown quietly. I have learned to listen for the sound of it.”
Wriothesley didn’t respond to that. He couldn’t. His throat was suddenly tight.
There had been times—long, long ago—when he’d drowned too. Before the Fortress. Before the gloves. Before the certainty of fists. Times when the world had pressed too close, too cold, and he’d let it fill his lungs because it was easier than gasping through the ache. And no one had heard it. No one had seen it.
But Neuvillette… maybe he did.
Maybe he had.
That was dangerous. That was unbearable. That was—
“…You really don’t look at people the way other people do,” Wriothesley said suddenly, needing to break the weight of the moment before it crushed him. “You look at them like you’re trying to read them. Like we’re written in some language you’ve seen before.”
Neuvillette didn’t look at him. But his voice was quiet. Steady.
“Perhaps I am.”
Wriothesley let out a breath through his nose. “And what do you think I’m saying?”
There was a pause. The kind that held meaning.
Then: “You say ‘I am here.’ You say ‘I am trying.’ You say ‘Do not leave.’”
Wriothesley’s heart kicked hard behind his ribs.
He looked away.
“…You ever get tired of being right all the time?”
Neuvillette’s voice was nearly a whisper. “Yes.”
They didn’t speak again for some time.
It became a pattern after that. Not a schedule, exactly—Wriothesley wasn’t that predictable, and Neuvillette didn’t demand routine—but a rhythm. A tide. On days when the rain fell particularly gently, when the sky held too many things unspoken, Wriothesley would make his way to the court. Not loudly. Not ceremoniously. He simply appeared, like a thought returning after a long silence.
Sometimes Neuvillette would be waiting on the terrace, other times in the lower cloisters, or at the edge of the reflecting pools behind the archives. Always somewhere quiet. Always somewhere the rain could reach.
And always—always—that same unspoken invitation in his posture. Sit. Listen. Begin again.
They rarely spoke of the rain directly.
Instead, they talked of other things. Of memory. Of failure. Of justice. Of mercy.
And through those conversations, Wriothesley began to understand: the rain did not need to be interpreted like law. It did not demand verdicts. It offered. It witnessed. It waited.
He’d never known how to wait without trying to fix something.
But now… he was learning.
One evening, the sky was overcast but dry.
Wriothesley still came.
He found Neuvillette standing in the shadow of the old courthouse façade, where ivy clung to worn stone and the air still smelled faintly of the sea.
“You’re early,” Neuvillette said, turning.
Wriothesley shrugged. “Didn’t want to miss anything.”
Neuvillette looked at him. He said nothing.
And Wriothesley felt his pulse stumble, just once.
“Besides,” he added, more casual now, “been thinking about what you said. About how the rain doesn’t lie.”
“Yes?”
“…What if I do?”
Neuvillette raised an eyebrow.
Wriothesley shifted his weight, uncomfortable. “I mean—I’ve lied before. A lot. Said I was fine when I wasn’t. Said I didn’t care when I did. Hell, I built my whole image on not needing anyone. But if I’m supposed to be listening to the rain now… shouldn’t I try to match it? Be honest?”
Neuvillette was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, “The rain does not expect you to be perfect. Only truthful.”
“That’s the problem,” Wriothesley muttered. “I don’t know what my truth is anymore.”
And that was it, wasn’t it?
Not the sadness. Not the anger.
The confusion.
He’d lived too many lives by now. The fighter. The inmate. The Warden. The protector. The brute. The boy who wasn’t supposed to make it, who did, and still didn’t know what to do with himself on the other side of survival.
Who was he, if not the person who kept others safe?
Who was he, if Neuvillette was looking at him not as a function, but a person?
Who was he, if someone like that saw worth in him?
He didn’t know.
He was terrified to find out.
“I think,” Neuvillette said gently, “that is the beginning of listening.”
Wriothesley huffed. “Even when it sucks?”
“Especially then.”
And maybe that was what broke the dam inside him. Not a flood. Not a sob. But the slow, steady leaking of things he had never let himself say.
“I’m tired,” he said softly.
“I know.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
“I want to stop pretending I don’t want to be seen.”
Neuvillette’s voice, when it came, was softer than the dusk.
“You are already seen.”
The rain hadn’t started falling.
But Wriothesley swore the air itself bowed toward him.
It was strange how the silence didn’t rush to fill the space after that.
Wriothesley had expected something—an ache in his throat, a recoil, the old reflex to laugh it off or change the subject, maybe even run. But none of that came. Nothing snapped closed. Nothing shattered. The words had come out—shy, sodden, unguarded—and the sky had not collapsed around him. He was still standing. The world had not turned away.
More shocking still, neither had Neuvillette.
He was there, the way he always was. Steady. Composed. Listening, not in the way most people did—with polite eyes and distracted minds—but truly listening, the kind of stillness that wasn’t waiting to speak, only to understand.
Wriothesley looked at him.
Neuvillette did not look back right away. His gaze was on the sky, pale lashes damp with mist, strands of silver hair catching the wind like seaweed adrift. His posture didn’t change, but the space between them did. The air seemed to hold its breath around them, every droplet suspended in a hush that felt—if not sacred, then known. Shared.
Wriothesley had never felt holy in his life.
But he felt seen. And maybe that was close enough.
“…You know,” he said eventually, voice lower than before, “this is probably the part where someone tells me I’m not broken.”
Neuvillette’s gaze returned to him, sharp and soft all at once.
“I would never say that,” he replied.
Wriothesley raised a brow. “No?”
“I do not believe you are broken. But more importantly—” his voice gentled further, as if stepping barefoot into something fragile—“I do not think there is anything wrong with needing time to understand yourself.”
Wriothesley stared at him. “That… wasn’t the answer I was expecting.”
“No,” Neuvillette said. “It rarely is.”
A beat passed. Wriothesley let it sit. Let it breathe. Let it melt into the quiet between them like honey dissolving into tea.
He thought about time. About how much of it he’d wasted trying to armor himself in roles. Trying to be strong in ways that meant being untouched, unflinching, unreadable. As if endurance could be confused with peace, as if silence could be mistaken for safety. He thought about how long it had taken him to slow down, to stop treating vulnerability like a loose brick in the wall of his life.
Maybe Neuvillette wasn’t offering answers because he wasn’t meant to. Maybe this was never about solving anything. Maybe it was only about allowing.
And maybe that was the first truth he could offer in return.
“…I don’t know what I’m doing,” Wriothesley said finally. “Not just with the rain. With anything. I go through the motions, I make the calls, I do what needs doing. But most days, it still feels like I’m playing a part I wasn’t written for.”
Neuvillette didn’t blink.
“You are not alone in that.”
That stopped him.
Wriothesley tilted his head. “You?”
“I have played many parts,” Neuvillette said softly. “Some I chose. Some were chosen for me. And I, too, have spent lifetimes trying to remember which version of myself is closest to the truth.”
That image—Neuvillette, sculpted from centuries and sorrow, struggling not just with duty but with identity—dug its hands into Wriothesley’s chest and held.
“But you always seem so sure,” he said, not accusing, just… searching.
“I have become good at appearing that way.”
Wriothesley let out a breath. “Then you must think I’m terrible at it.”
Neuvillette’s eyes gentled further. “No. I think you are honest in ways I have forgotten how to be.”
That… that hurt in a way that didn’t ache. It mattered. Wriothesley wanted to turn it into something—banter, a tease, a self-deprecating quip—but the words wouldn’t come. They sat low in his throat like warmth unspoken.
“I never thought honesty could look like this,” he murmured.
Neuvillette tilted his head slightly, the faintest pull of curiosity. “Like what?”
Wriothesley swallowed.
“Like letting someone stay.”
The look Neuvillette gave him then was not wide-eyed. It was not surprised. But it was intimate, in the way only truth can be. Like the sky when it opens to let the rain fall. Like a cello note held too long. Like a tide that reaches the same shore again and again, no matter how often it’s pulled away.
“I have not left,” Neuvillette said.
“No,” Wriothesley whispered. “You haven’t.”
And that—more than the rain, more than the questions, more than the careful, aching words—was what finally undid him.
His body didn’t move, not much. His hands stayed tucked in his pockets. His shoulders didn’t sag. But something in him gave. A tension long-held released. A lock clicked open. He exhaled, not like someone bracing, but like someone letting go.
The rain began again.
Soft, like memory.
Neuvillette stepped closer. Not much. Barely a pace. But it was enough to feel his presence more keenly—warm despite the weather, steady despite the ache. He didn’t reach out. He didn’t need to.
Wriothesley could feel it. That readiness. That invitation. That closeness.
“I don’t know if I’m ready,” Wriothesley murmured, barely audible.
Neuvillette replied, “You need not to be.”
He didn’t say more. Didn’t fill the space with reassurances, didn’t try to soothe what couldn’t be smoothed. He simply was—a presence beside him, equal to the weight, not dragging it away, not asking him to be less.
And so Wriothesley turned.
Just a little.
Just enough that their shoulders nearly brushed.
Neuvillette didn’t move away.
Wriothesley didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to.
He closed his eyes.
Let the rain soak in.
Let himself be here.
And for the first time in a very long time, he didn’t feel like he was drowning.
He felt like he was held.
The rain was slower now. Not in its rhythm, but in its intention. Like it had settled into the curve of their silence, found a home in the space between breath and unspoken things. Wriothesley kept his eyes closed, and for once, he didn’t feel the need to do anything else. He didn’t speak. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even count the seconds.
Because Neuvillette was still there.
He was not looming. Or hovering. Just there—close enough that Wriothesley could sense the shape of him, could feel the quiet weight of his presence without ever needing to look.
It was more comforting than he knew how to admit. More terrifying, too. Because comfort, real comfort, was not something Wriothesley trusted easily. It was slippery. Ephemeral. The kind of thing that left scars when it vanished. But Neuvillette didn’t feel like something temporary. He felt inevitable. Like weather. Like tide.
Like change.
“…You know,” Wriothesley said eventually, eyes still shut, “I think I was afraid to say it out loud. That I wanted to stay.”
The rain responded before Neuvillette could.
It slipped from the edge of the stone awning above them in a single drop—just one. It landed against Wriothesley’s knuckles, soaked already through his gloves, but the weight of it still surprised him.
As if it heard.
As if it was listening back.
“You are allowed to want things,” Neuvillette said, voice soft but not uncertain. “Even if you are not ready to act on them.”
That made Wriothesley breathe out, slow and unsteady. He turned his palm up, caught another drop.
“…I think I’ve always wanted too much.”
“And so you learned to want nothing.”
It wasn’t a question. Neuvillette never asked when he already knew.
Still, Wriothesley gave him an answer. “Yeah.”
A pause.
“But it didn’t work.”
“No.”
Wriothesley opened his eyes. The sky was smeared with soft gray, the kind that held no threat, no storm—only melancholy. The kind of sky that stayed all afternoon and asked nothing of you.
He looked down. The stone beneath his boots was pale and slick with mist. He traced the rain’s path with his gaze—how it threaded between the cobblestones, pooled in the cracks, followed the lines the world gave it. The rain never fought the shape of the ground. It just flowed through it. Around it. With it.
Maybe that was what Neuvillette meant, all along.
“Do you ever think it’s too late to want something?” Wriothesley asked, not even sure where the words were coming from until they left his mouth.
Neuvillette was quiet for a moment. Then: “Wanting is not a thing that obeys time.”
Wriothesley blinked.
“I think you say that just to sound poetic.”
“No,” Neuvillette said. “I say it because it’s true.”
He turned slightly, just enough that their arms brushed. Cloth against cloth. Elbow to elbow.
“You have not missed your chance to be loved,” he said.
The words were not dramatic. Not sharp. But they landed like a bell toll in Wriothesley’s chest.
It wasn’t even the word love that undid him.
It was the assumption of it. The way Neuvillette said it as if it wasn’t something unreachable. As if it belonged to Wriothesley already, or could, without needing to be earned. As if it was not a reward, but a truth.
And that was what scared him the most.
Because some part of him wanted to believe it.
He swallowed. “You say that like you know what to do with love.”
“I don’t,” Neuvillette admitted. “But I know what it is not.”
Wriothesley tilted his head, encouraged despite himself. “And what’s that?”
“It is not quiet,” Neuvillette said. “It does not vanish in doubt. It does not require performance. And it does not flee when met with grief.”
Wriothesley went very still.
“And,” Neuvillette added, “it is not something you must deserve.”
That—
Gods.
That was the part no one had ever told him. That was the part he didn’t know how to hear. Not something you must deserve.
It broke something open inside him, something old and hollow and echoing. He wanted to laugh, or sob, or fall forward until he stopped feeling so much. But Neuvillette didn’t move. Didn’t ask. Didn’t offer anything except his presence.
So Wriothesley leaned. Just barely.
Their shoulders touched fully now.
And Neuvillette… leaned back with a kind of ease that suggested it had never been a question.
Wriothesley let his eyes flutter shut again. The rain was a hush now, soft as breath against the city’s cheek. The world felt smaller here, safer. Held.
“I don’t want this to be just a moment,” he said quietly.
Neuvillette’s voice was steady. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“I do.”
Wriothesley opened his eyes. Turned toward him, slow. “You do?”
Neuvillette’s lips curved—small, soft, real.
“I know how to stay.”
It was the kind of thing that should have hurt to hear. But it didn’t. It felt like being chosen.
They didn’t kiss.
They didn’t touch more than that—just the weight of arm to arm, breath to breath, silence to silence.
But Wriothesley felt it. The shift. The beginning. The possibility of something built not on pain, but persistence. Not on duty, but desire. Not on hiding, but hope.
He didn’t speak again. He didn’t have to.
Neuvillette reached for his hand then—not with ceremony or caution. Just simply. Gloved fingers to gloved fingers.
And Wriothesley let him.
Let it happen.
Let himself feel it.
Because maybe this—this unhurried, unspoken, unshattered thing—was the language of rain after all.
---
The next day, the rain was gone.
Not entirely—its traces lingered, of course, as they always did. In the soft hush of the morning mist, in the clean sheen on cobblestone and copper, in the scent that clung to the city like memory. Fontaine always remembered its rain. Even when it passed, it left something behind.
Wriothesley walked slowly through the quieter avenues near the court, coat slung over his shoulder, hair still damp from where the fog had gathered in it. His gloves were off. He carried them in one hand, unthinking. His other hand—the one Neuvillette had held—felt warm still, even hours later. Like the imprint of another presence had not faded entirely.
He hadn’t meant to stay that long. He never meant to. These meetings had always started as something soft, something temporary, something like… reprieve. But it had grown. Quietly. Steadily. The way moss overtakes stone. The way tide smooths jagged things.
The way Neuvillette had looked at him—
I know how to stay.
He hadn’t said it like a vow. That was what made it dangerous.
He had said it like truth.
Wriothesley wasn’t sure what to do with that. With being met—matched—so gently. Without suspicion. Without demand. Without a single string pulled tight.
He reached the gate of the Fortress and paused, fingers tightening around the gloves in his hand.
Inside, the world would go back to turning. Reports. Patrols. Training rounds. Steel and discipline and the comfort of structure. His guards would nod in silent respect. Sigewinne would ask if he was eating enough. The lights would hum and the air would be filtered and the walls would not shift or ache or offer him anything but what he built into them.
He would be Warden again.
But this morning—this day—he wanted something else.
So he turned and walked back the way he came.
Neuvillette was not at the terrace. Nor in the garden. But Wriothesley knew how to listen now.
He stood in the middle of the court’s great hall and closed his eyes.
The silence was full of footsteps. Distant voices. The whisper of documents being passed, of pens scratching parchment, of law and life braided together. But underneath that—deeper than sound—he felt it. That same presence. That same weight. The sense of being witnessed by something too still to name.
He followed it down the inner corridor. Through the east wing where fewer visitors tread, where the ceiling sloped and the light fell through long glass windows like water through a sieve.
He found Neuvillette at the far end of the corridor, seated on a long bench carved into the stone itself, a stack of legal documents resting forgotten beside him. His hands were folded neatly in his lap. He was staring at the sky beyond the archway, and though it was pale now, washed in silver, Wriothesley thought it looked like it still remembered how to cry.
Wriothesley didn’t speak. Just walked over and sat down beside him, close but not quite touching.
Neuvillette turned. Slowly. As if he'd already known he would be there.
Wriothesley leaned forward, elbows to knees, hands still bare. He studied the way light caught on the edge of Neuvillette’s profile—sharp and soft in equal measure, like the way waves cut at stone until it relented.
“You always sit like that when you’re thinking,” he said eventually.
Neuvillette raised a brow. “Like what?”
“Almost like you’re about to rise into the sky.”
Neuvillette blinked once. And then, very softly: “Would that be so terrible?”
Wriothesley’s smile didn’t quite reach his mouth. “Only if you don’t come back.”
They let that settle.
Neuvillette looked away again, toward the clouds.
“Would you miss me?” he asked.
Wriothesley didn’t answer at first. Instead, he reached down. Picked up a small puddle that had gathered in the lip of the stone near their feet. Just cupped it in his hand and let it trickle through his fingers.
He watched it fall.
Then said, “I think I already do.”
That made Neuvillette look at him again.
“I mean,” Wriothesley said, slower now, “even when you’re here. It’s like… you’re a little too far away. Like I’m always walking toward you, and you’re waiting at the shoreline, and I’m afraid I’ll blink and find out you were never there at all.”
Neuvillette did not speak.
But the look in his eyes—gods. It was not pity. It was not discomfort.
It was ache.
“I am here,” he said.
And then, quieter—closer—
“I want to be here.”
This time, Wriothesley turned toward him fully. Didn’t hide it. Didn’t duck the intimacy of it. He searched his face like a man looking for something he’d lost.
“You want to,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“That’s new.”
Neuvillette nodded. “It is.”
“Scary.”
“Yes.”
Wriothesley rubbed a hand down his jaw, suddenly restless. “I don’t know what this is. What we’re doing. If we’re even doing anything at all.”
Neuvillette didn’t move away.
Instead, he reached for one of Wriothesley’s bare hands.
Their palms met, warm.
“This is listening,” Neuvillette said.
Wriothesley froze.
And then—very, very slowly—he relaxed into it.
Because yes.
Yes, that was it.
They weren’t building something grand yet. They weren’t declaring. They weren’t promising.
They were listening.
To each other.
To the silence.
To the rain—even in its absence.
“Neuvillette,” Wriothesley said, name caught somewhere between reverence and exhaustion, “I’ve fought every damn thing in my life. Even the things that tried to love me.”
Neuvillette’s fingers closed around his.
“I know,” he said.
Wriothesley looked down at their hands.
“I don’t want to fight this.”
“Then don’t.”
The words settled like dusk.
Wriothesley stared at their joined hands and thought, absurdly, about erosion. About how water wears down stone—not violently, not all at once, but patiently. Unrelentingly. The kind of slow undoing that isn’t destruction, but a gentle reformation. And he wondered if this was what was happening to him. If Neuvillette had not broken his defenses but softened them. If being held was not a surrender, but a return.
He didn’t speak. Couldn’t.
But he didn’t let go.
The sky outside the archway was still pale, but a shift in the light made him glance upward.
The clouds were drawing closer again. Not thick—not ominous. Just a softening of the blue. A curtain slowly pulling itself closed. The kind of weather that whispered instead of wept. That breathed.
Neuvillette followed his gaze, and his expression—always serene, always distant—shifted. It was subtle. Barely a change. But Wriothesley saw it.
He had learned how to see, after all.
“You miss it,” he said.
Neuvillette didn’t deny it.
“I carry it with me,” he said. “But yes.”
Wriothesley tilted his head, thoughtful. “Is that why you’re always listening for it?”
“Yes.” A pause. “And because… it has never left me.”
Wriothesley swallowed. “Wish I could say the same about the things I’ve loved.”
Neuvillette turned then, not away from the sky but toward him, fully—shoulders angling, knees shifting slightly. The movement was slow. Intentional. Close.
“You can,” he said.
And the way he said it—
Wriothesley forgot how to breathe for a second.
“I’ve spent so long,” he said, voice low and uneven, “thinking I had to earn gentleness. Like it was a reward. Something I’d get after I’d bled enough. Fought enough. Endured enough.”
His fingers curled around Neuvillette’s without meaning to.
“I didn’t know it could start there.”
Neuvillette’s eyes were steady. “It can.”
Wriothesley blinked.
It was the blinking that did it. The tremble of that second. The closing and opening of the world. The way the light shifted just so—cool and gray and soft as a sigh. The way his pulse stuttered and surged like something had touched it.
He looked at Neuvillette’s mouth. He didn’t mean to.
And Neuvillette—
Neuvillette didn’t look away.
The closeness wasn’t new. They had been close before. Shoulders brushing. Palms resting together. Words spoken in the hush between things. But this—this was different.
This was not silence.
This was invitation.
“I don’t want to ruin it,” Wriothesley whispered.
“You won’t.”
“I might not be what you expect.”
“You are already more.”
Wriothesley’s throat worked. He shifted forward, barely a breath. His free hand rose without thought, halted just before Neuvillette’s cheek.
“Can I…?”
“You may.”
So he touched him.
His knuckles grazed the edge of Neuvillette’s jaw first—an almost accidental thing. Then, carefully, his palm. Cool skin. Softer than he’d imagined. He traced the line of Neuvillette’s cheekbone with his thumb, and it felt like holding a breath that didn’t want to end.
Neuvillette did not move away.
He only leaned into the touch.
And Wriothesley—
Wriothesley did not know how to be reverent. But he was learning.
So he kissed him.
Gently.
Slowly.
Like he was still asking the question with his mouth.
And Neuvillette—gods—answered.
Tenderly.
Their lips met and held, not with urgency, but understanding. The kind of kiss that doesn’t spark, but sinks. That doesn’t rush, but listens. Wriothesley let it happen like something sacred. Like something found after years of searching.
Like rain meeting ocean.
When they parted, it was not with loss, but with stillness.
Wriothesley let his forehead fall gently against Neuvillette’s, and their breaths mingled. One. Then two. Then three.
“Was that…” he began, then trailed off.
Neuvillette smiled, barely. “That was listening.”
Wriothesley laughed, soft and real.
And above them, outside the archway, the clouds thickened just enough to weep again—lightly. A single drop. Then another. Then the sky opened its lungs and exhaled, not with sorrow, but relief.
The rain had returned.
So had they.
Wriothesley kissed him again, and this time, the world did not hold its breath.
It simply listened.
And stayed.