Chapter Text
Wriothesley and his daemon sat down to a large plate of food. Braised meat with a thick red wine sauce, with sauteed fresh vegetables and a salad of fresh, crisp greens and another side of sauteed green beans.
Things that he can’t easily get beneath the waves.
There was a plate of fresh meat, another roast more to the taste of Wriothesley’s daemon, seasoned rice, chunks of roasted potatoes.
Steamed fish with fragrant herbs, potatoes mashed into a soft paste with butter, sauteed mushrooms in sauce.
It was all a grand feast, far more food than what they all needed.
Bishou held court over a large platter of shellfish and some of the steamed fish and there were large containers of soup, which Neuvillette had poured into crocks that he warmed in the kitchen.
“This is too much,” Wriothesley protested softly.
“Perhaps,” Neuvillette agreed. Though her human didn’t, Bishou smiled, her whiskers curling forward. “But I wasn’t sure what to serve you. I hadn’t expected to ever host you here.”
Wriothesley frowned. “Yet you handed Lionel and Leona your address,” he pointed out.
“We did,” Bishou agreed. “But given how we’d parted recently, we doubted you would call on us. You are always welcome,” she added quickly. “We just weren’t expecting you to actually come. Especially not…well, not anytime soon.”
Surprised, Wriothesley looked at Neuvillette. “Why would you ever expect us to visit?” he asked.
It was…perhaps a little blunt, he realized in hindsight when Neuvillette and Bishou both looked away. But it was a fair question.
“Isn’t this your private residence?” Wriothesley asked. “We had never had anything but a professional relationship. I’m never on the surface to visit except for meetings with you or to attend Court.”
“This is our private residence,” Neuvillette said, which didn’t exactly answer the questions he hadn’t asked out loud.
Bishou delicately ate a mussel. Seeing Wriothesley’s daemon looking at her, she gave her a lutine smile and offered one to her.
“And we are happy to host you,” Bishou said.
“You want us to visit,” Wriothesley said, getting a little annoyed. His daemon took the offered mussel, her tail hesitantly wagging. “Why? We’re not even friends.”
Neuvillette gave him a serene look, but his eyes looked hurt. “We have always considered you…friends. We understand that you don’t feel the same.” The hesitance was barely noticeable but so much of Neuvillette’s behaviors were; Wriothesley noticed it immediately. “But even if you don’t feel the same way, you are always welcome here.”
Licking her lips, Wriothesley’s daemon looked back and forth between them. She looked at Neuvillette. “What do you know of my name?” she asked.
“Some,” Bishou admitted. “No name was given at the time of arrest, and no name appears on your file, but through the course of the investigation, more names were found.”
That startled Wriothesley. “You know,” he said softly.
“We know the names that you were called,” Neuvillette replied. “It was not brought up in Court because it was not deemed necessary. There was proof that you wanted a new start rather than to run away, so it was kept from the record. But there were adoption records and other paperwork regarding you.”
Bishou shrugged. “There was no need to know it and it wasn’t a name that you gave us to use. So we didn’t use it.”
“As I suspected,” Wriothesley’s daemon said. She walked over and sat beside Neuvillette, resting her head on the armrest of his chair. “Do you know what I’m called now?”
“You didn’t give us a name,” Neuvillette said softly, lifting his arm out of the way. “So we didn’t pry. We didn’t expect to be told.”
Wriothesley’s daemon looked at him. “Why?” Wriothesley asked.
“You know why,” his daemon replied. She stood up on her hind legs, bracing her paws on the armrest. Her claws scratched at the fancy armrest, at the nice wood and fine fabric, but Neuvillette didn’t even glance at it. He didn’t shy away from her, but his eyes—adorably alarmed and confused—shot to Wriothesley.
Neuvillette’s eyes widened as Wriothesley’s daemon leaned close. As she put her snout next to his ear, close enough that he could smell the garlic and herbs on her breath from the mussel she’d eaten, close enough that he could feel the hot puff of breath against his ear and cheek.
She told him a name, a secret between them four.
When she pulled away and sat down again, Neuvillette turned to look at her. “Why have you told me this?” he asked softly. For a moment, his face changed. His expression was opened, as if she had broken through the shields hiding his soft heart.
Neuvillette looked…it was hard to say even so. There were so many layers to his expression.
He looked soft, almost happy. Pleased to have been entrusted with this secret.
He looked hopeful. He looked excited.
He looked scared, as if afraid of his answer. He looked worried about what it might mean, to be entrusted with such a secret.
Neuvillette looked at Bishou, the both of them sharing a long, secret conversation. Then he leaned down, moving his hair to the side as it began to fall over his shoulder, and whispered two names into Wriothesley’s daemon’s ear.
When he pulled back, Wriothesley’s daemon looked up at him. “You were courting us,” she said simply.
They had all known, to some degree, of course, but none of them had ever said it out loud. To say it out loud would be to make it real.
“Courting implies that we would expect you to accept or return our feelings,” Bishou said quietly, after a long pause.
“The umbrella and the raincoat,” Wriothesley said softly. “The tea you buy, the tea sets. All this food.”
“We saw a need and filled it,” Neuvillette said, still not looking at them. His eyes lingered somewhere over Wriothesley’s daemon’s ears. “We had the means to do so, to make life easier, and we wanted to do it.”
For a long moment, they were silent.
“Where do we go from here?” Wriothesley asked at last. “What…did you expect?”
“Nothing,” Neuvillette said immediately. “We have never expected you to return our feelings, or to acknowledge them. This type of dalliance would be quite inappropriate given our differences in age and…species. And given our lifespan, it would be…ill advised to pursue such attachments. Further, it would be inappropriate, as we must remain neutral—”
“Bullshit,” Wriothesley’s daemon said flatly.
Neuvillette’s voice faltered.
“Bullshit,” Wriothesley repeated. “You’re not impartial and you know it.”
For a long moment, they were silent.
At last, Neuvillette said very quietly, “No. We aren’t.”
“But what we said was still true,” Bishou added. “We didn’t ever expect you to notice or respond. We truly didn’t. Why would you ever choose us?”
Wriothesley sat back in his seat, then rocked forward to bury his face in his hands. “You can’t just spring this on me.”
“I’d been telling you,” his daemon said simply, but she moved closer to him.
Awkwardly, Neuvillette looked down at Bishou, then took a sip of water.
Wriothesley stood. “I need…time.”
“Take all the time you need,” Neuvillette said, standing too. “It is…as I said. We expect no reciprocation, not even acknowledgement.”
“I can’t do that.” Wriothesley said tersely. He shrugged into his coat and, without another glance at them, left.
Casimir Millardet looked so very small on the witness stand, sitting in a chair that was far too big for him. If he sat with his back to the backrest, his feet would stick straight out; if he sat at the edge, his shoes wouldn’t touch the floor. His daemon Adelajda was in the form of a mouse, nervous and unobtrusive, cradled in his hands.
Simona and Olivia were allowed to remain nearby but weren’t allowed to speak; they would need to find comfort only in their proximity.
Matron Laetitia sat beside her lawyer, her lips pressed into a thin, unhappy line. Her lawyer was particularly aggressive, waving his hands in grand gestures and, when speaking to Casimir and Adelajda, spoke as if accusing them rather than asking them questions. He looked quite dramatic, like something out of some play or opera. His daemon was some kind of long-legged bird with snowy white feathers. The tips of her wings and tail were tipped in solid black like spilled ink, and the feathers around her eyes were a vibrant red and orange and gold, giving her a dramatic appearance; combined with the spiky feathers that rose up around her head, she looked like some kind of dancer. Whenever the lawyer gestured dramatically, his daemon spread her wings.
The crowd had been charmed by him, and by the drama and spectacle of his daemon.
But there was always sympathy for a small child fitted in clothing too loose for him to make him seem smaller. Who cradled his mouse daemon close and stared at the crowds with wide eyes. Who needed someone close to comfort him.
There had been adult witnesses of course. Experts that said that Casimir and Adelajda’s sudden change in character was a sign of abuse. Children testified as well that Matron Laetitia and Matron Klementyna were wonderful, that they were like mothers. That they were treated well, fed well, taught well.
Most damning, though, was Casimir’s stories about the child-stealers. Monsters who stole children away, who wore pretty faces and gentle smiles while preparing them for slaughter, to be fed at their expensive dinner parties. Who showered children with pretty things, with riches beyond anything they’d had before and pretended to love them.
Stories told by Matron Laetitia and Klementyna, and their in-training duo, Cuauhtemoc and Xóchitl.
Cuauhtemoc had been particularly cruel, and Xóchitl had described in disgusting detail what the entrails of a child looked like, how desperate butchers used them for substitutes of other meat. It was cheap, it was quick, and they both bet that their new owners, Monsieur and Madame Lavigny, would try to feed them meat scraps from their dead friends. That surely they must understand that their daemons Gheorghe and Héloïse were predators, that they were child-eaters, that they probably have the taste for child-flesh.
There were several teary eyes, many who looked sick, as Casimir and Adelajda cried on the stand as they described the way that Cuauhtemoc had claimed that they’d seen the records, that they’d seen all of the children sold to the Lavignys.
The case made headlines for weeks. The Steambird had an entire section dedicated to updates on the trial. It was all anyone talked about, even the monsters beneath the sea. After the first few days, Wriothesley had to return to his underworld and rule there once more. No matter what the courts decided, all of Meropide knew who was guilty and no matter what sins they’d committed in a past life, they abhorred child-killers, child-stealers.
Should Laetitia and Klementyna be convicted and sent to Meropide, it would be a death sentence no matter what the courts tried to say.
With such a high profile case with such delicate details, it lasted for nearly a month before the verdict was given. No one was surprised, at least not anyone that wasn’t Matron Laetitia and Klementyna, or their lawyer and his daemon.
She tried to wail, tried to make a scene, tried to cry that she was an innocent woman who was wronged. But the public, who always loved a good spectacle, had largely turned against her. Instead of sympathy, Madame Laetitia and Klementyna only received looks of disgust.
Nor was anyone surprised when, on the day that they were to be taken to Meropide, they found her dead in her holding cell, golden dust in the palm of her hand. The other inmates claimed that Matron Laetitia and Klementyna had been arguing. It had escalated. Since there were no other witnesses, it had to be believed that Matron Laetitia had killed her own daemon—and thus herself—in her irrational rage.
Cuauhtemoc and Xóchitl were sentenced to Meropide as well, but bird daemons had never done well in such close quarters and confined spaces. They were transferred to another facility to accommodate daemons that did not thrive beneath the water, and shortly after their first week, Xóchitl attacked her own human, causing him to lose an eye. It seemed to be a turning point for them, the catalyst needed.
In their court-mandatory therapy, they opened up more about the case. About their history. How they’d been molded by Madame Laetita and Klementyna to be the perfect successor and the poison she dripped in their ears. Reminders of their Otherness, how nearly every other child in Madame Laetitia and Klementyna’s care were Fontainian but them? They were Others, foreigners only in their looks. That poison had festered in them and that, in addition to the loss of their family, had turned them bitter and angry. According to the most recent reports, they were completely cooperating with investigators to find and prosecute the rest of the group.
Five more arrests had been made already.
As for the other children, they were evaluated by several trained professionals—the group that Neuvillette had quietly started ever since Wriothesley’s case all those years ago—and transferred to several other orphanages in the area that had the space and the means. Neuvillette confided in Wriothesley that he spoke personally to The Knave and the twins at the House of the Hearth and though none of them necessarily trusted the Harbingers or the Fatui, Neuvillette and Bishou had received promises of support.
Evidently, there was a fine line that The Knave wouldn’t cross. She would train future spies and soldiers for the Fatui and would prepare children for the hard lives that would follow those children, but she refused to harm them outright. She refused to sell them like cattle at the slaughter, or treat them as anything less than children in need of a stable place to live.
A large amount of the children from Laetitia and Klementyna’s orphanage ended up going to the House of the Hearth and its various subsidiaries, and Lynette had told Neuvillette that she and Lyney would personally look into each case, each house, on a regular basis to make sure that the children were alright.
Neuvillette had admitted that though he didn’t often understand humans, there was something in Lynette and her daemon’s eyes that convinced him of their veracity.
There were more investigations. Teams were still combing the now-empty orphanage for anything more that had been hidden.
And there had been. More graves had been dug, little things with little coffins and modest headstones far fancier than many other burials in that plot—the forgotten dead of the Court, the unclaimed bodies, the ones whose families didn’t know of their death, couldn’t afford a formal burial, or didn’t care—that Neuvillette and Bishou privately admitted they personally funded.
It was within their right and even if it wasn’t, no one would argue about Neuvillette and Bishou spending their personal funds on such a thing. They shared a map with Wriothesley and his daemon as well, and the plot numbers of those quiet, forgotten graves.
Wriothesley set down the file. It was a bittersweet kind of satisfaction that he felt. “So that’s that, I guess,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Neuvillette replied.
“It’s not going to stop it,” Wriothesley couldn’t help but say. “This will just delay it.”
Neuvillette nodded. “It is a sad thing to think about,” he said. “But that is unfortunately true. I wish that a case such as this would be the end of it, but there was…a need. Getting rid of the store does not get rid of the product.” He wrinkled his nose.
“We know what you meant,” Wriothesley’s daemon said, eyes half-closed as she rested her snout on the arm of his chair.
For a long moment, there was silence in Neuvillette’s spacious, well-lit office. It was an almost comfortable silence, though. No matter what any of them thought or wanted, they knew that these types of battles, these types of trials, would never end. Perhaps it was a defeatist kind of thought—at least, that was what Wriothesley’s court-mandated therapist had once said so long ago—but Wriothesley liked to think of it as the thought of someone aware of the evils of the world.
Yet…for there to be evil, there had to be good. Though Neuvillette and Bishou were far from being gods, omniscient and omnipotent and any other “omni” that would apply to a “true” god, they were certainly good. Not perfect, of course—to err is human as they say.
“What was your plan?” Wriothesley asked before he could convince himself otherwise. “With us, I mean.”
Neuvillette blinked at him. “Our plan?” he echoed. “What do you mean?”
Wriothesley hesitated. “With your whole…courting thing.”
“Nothing,” Neuvillette said with an innocent blink. Actually innocent, not playing at it. The man—or dragon, perhaps—was surprisingly innocent in many ways, almost adorably so. “We hadn’t expected you to notice our clumsy efforts, much less acknowledge them as courtship. And if you did, we would of course hold you to no expectation. Your choice is still yours, and if you do not see us in the same way, then it will change nothing in our regard for you.”
Bishou shook her head. “What we mean is that we would follow your lead,” she said. “If you wished to pursue us romantically or sexually, then we would agree; if you did not return our feelings in any way, then we would continue with our professional relationship and nothing more.”
“Wouldn’t it hurt?” Wriothesley’s daemon asked.
“It would,” Neuvillette agreed as casually as if talking about the weather. “But please remember…Bishou and I have been in this position of ours for over 500 human years.”
Wriothesley’s daemon tilted her head to the side.
“So you’re comparing our lack of reciprocation for your feelings to watching your friends die?” Wriothesley asked bluntly.
“Wriothesley,” his daemon chided.
Neuvillette shrugged. “To some degree, yes,” he said. “It is a kind of loss that we would grieve.”
“And if we returned your feelings?” Wriothesley asked suspiciously.
“We would court you at the pace you are comfortable with,” Neuvillette replied. He shifted, his hands clenching around the file in his hands, the only obvious sign of his discomfort. “If you were to reciprocate our feelings, then we would…discuss matters with you. We would allow you to set the pace and let us know what you were comfortable with, what you desired from us.”
Once more, silence returned to Neuvillette’s office. Outside, the sky was overcast—it had been all morning, had been ever since the trial. Wriothesley couldn’t blame Neuvillette (if it was indeed him and not actually the weather) for feeling off, but it would make things easier if he could use the weather to gauge his mood.
He looked down at his daemon and she nodded back.
Neuvillette shifted when Wriothesley’s daemon moved in front of him. “What do you think of my name?” she asked.
“I think nothing,” Neuvillette said. “Except to think that we are truly honored to be entrusted with it. It is a secret, something you don’t share with anyone, so it will not be something that we call you.”
Wriothesley’s daemon smiled. “Is there something that you’d like to call us? A name just for you?”
Curious, Bishou trotted over. “What are you asking?”
Slowly, Wriothesley’s daemon laid her head on Neuvillette’s thigh. There were still several layers between them—his trousers, his spats—so it didn’t entirely break the taboo, but it was close enough that Neuvillette sucked in a surprised breath. Wriothesley’s daemon watched him with calm, ice-blue eyes the same color as Wriothesley’s Vision.
Neuvillette looked up at Wriothesley who smiled softly at him. He nodded.
Hesitantly, Neuvillette reached out and stroked Wriothesley’s daemon’s tattered ears. She closed her eyes, humming at his touch. “You can take your gloves off,” she said.
“I didn’t want to assume,” Neuvillette said. He looked at Bishou who galloped over to Wriothesley and jumped up on the chaise beside him. With shaking hands, Neuvillette took off his gloves and reached for Wriothesley’s daemon again.
Her fur was rough and wiry, but it was softer around her eyes, and her tattered ears felt, quite surprisingly, like velvet. Most importantly, she was warm, almost surprisingly so. He’d heard that some humans had a superstition that one’s potential Vision could be told by the warmth of their daemon (for Pyro Visions) or lack of (for Cryo Visions).
But Wriothesley’s daemon proved that superstition wrong. She was warm, just like Wriothesley’s kind heart.
She opened her eyes and smiled, having heard that thought where his hand touched her.
“Clementine,” Neuvillette blurted out. He stroked Wriothesley’s daemon’s ears again, then ran his fingers through her bristly mane, which had a rich red iron oxide and orange hue.
Wriothesley’s daemon—perhaps now Clementine—closed her eyes again and leaned further into Neuvillette’s touch. “I like that,” she agreed.
“Clem,” Wriothesley echoed. He hesitantly reached out to Bishou who watched him, her tail twitching in eager anticipation. “A name just for us. Madame…”
“That has never been a name between us,” Bishou corrected Wriothesley. “And yes, you may.”
Wriothesley hesitated one last time before lowering his hand to touch Bishou’s head.
They all sucked in a breath. It was like an electric current finally connected—as if they all snapped together as one.
An intimacy that so few claim to have experienced.
“What now?” one of them asked.
Neuvillette dug his fingers into Clementine’s thick mane, then scratched her behind her ears, much to her delight. “Should I take this as…some form of acceptance of our courtship?”
“That’s an awful joke,” Bishou chided as she climbed into Wriothesley’s lap, curling against his chest. With a delighted smile, Wriothesley curled an arm around her and held her close. “Don’t make a liar of me, Wriothesley,” she told him sternly as she snuggled close.
Wriothesley smiled and leaned down to press a feather-light kiss to Bishou’s head. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said gravely.
Looking down at Clementine, Neuvillette found her looking up at him with a soft expression in her ice-colored eyes. Leaning down, he kissed her snout.