#there's time for her to be a menace about neuvillette later... for now she just gets to be genuinely /happy/ for him

[immobiliter]

       While the thought of all that had been lacking in her life over the past centuries brought with it a sense of profound sadness, it was easy to put aside in favour of her curiosity at finding out why Vautrin had brought the topic up in the first place. Love — in the way that most humans understood it — might have been unfamiliar and alien to her, but it had always been a source of fascination all the same, something that she had ( until now, she supposed ) only been permitted to marvel at from afar.

       So Furina continued to sit and listen quietly as Vautrin entered into his story, having barely touched her own wine on the table. It was always a little jarring to hear him speak so clearly of a past that was now so distant to her, sometimes so difficult to recall and grasp, like grains of sand falling through her fingers, or a phonograph playing muffled sound from another room. But she remembered how rigid certain things were. The Fontaine she had inherited from Egeria post-Cataclysm was a vastly different place to the nation she lived in now.

       Slowly, the pieces came together, and when they all finally clicked into place, providing her with a name — a name surprising yet one Furina ought to have expected, a name that made perfect sense... the delight that rapidly filled her heart made it light and yet fit to burst at the same time. She beamed at him.

       Her dear Iudex, as lonely and isolated from the rest of humanity as she had been for all those years. The dragon sovereign she had summoned to her Court for reasons unknown to her at the time and taught to live among the humans he so tragically resembled. How many times had he balked at her pushing to go out among her people and connect with them? It seemed her attempts had not been in vain as she might have feared: saving all Fontainians from their sin aside, unbeknownst to her Neuvillette had also been the keeper to a human heart all this time.

       She could still sense her friend's discomfort and, in an attempt to alleviate it and coax his gaze, Furina reached across the table to take both of his hands in hers. “ Vautrin... the love you feel for this man was never wrong. ” She gently squeezed; matters of propriety regarding one's superior aside, she sensed that this was still something he needed to understand and accept about his life then. “ He was fortunate to have you then, and is even more fortunate to have you back in his life now. ”

       To think that if Vautrin had lived out his sentence in the Meropide as intended, he would have taken such a secret to the grave. Four hundred years late was not too late, now was it? Surely not to a dragon, nor to a human trapped in the Primordial Sea for the past four centuries... or a masquerading deity who had tried to amputate everything human about her long ago. Furina tilted her head at him sympathetically. “ And, knowing him as I do... he's completely oblivious to all of this, isn't he? ”

His ears burned hot the moment the words left his lips, but he cannot retract them now - and neither, really, does he want to. He is comfortable enough to allow this side of himself to shine through: the human, vulnerable edge he often kept hidden even when he was but a human. But despite his desire to open himself up, to trust her with his biggest secret, he still cannot shake the embarrassment of the subject, particularly as she is oh so familiar with the object of his heart's desire - though she does not know it. Yet.

Have you? she asks, and he feels the heat now creeping into his face. He takes a sip of wine, pretends not to notice the way his hand trembles ever so slightly as it lifts the glass to his lips. He has not spoken this out loud before. He never dreamed there would be a day where he could. And yet... here he is, preparing to do just that.

"I... have." He refuses to look at her - cannot, lest he quickly regret his decision and veer off into another topic. "Though it took me some time to realise it... and even longer to admit it."

"I was in denial for a very long time." He sighs, a sad sound that carries a thread of longing within it. "Things may be different now, but I am sure you remember how things were back then - society had certain rules, things that were considered... unacceptable. And there were standards, an image, that I had to live up to. So I convinced myself that what I felt was... simply the care of a close friend. I believed it, too, until..." Until the day I had to say goodbye, for what I thought would be forever.

He pauses, drinks more wine, and still he does not look at her. "The person I fell in love with... who I am still in love with even now... was the wrong person, back then." His voice quivers - he is nervous, beyond anything he has ever felt before. "A man." And here, now, is the reason for his nerves: "And, at that time, my superior."

There can be no question now to whom he refers. He was the captain of his division - the only superior he answered to was, of course, Neuvillette.