Work Text:
The first time it happens, it’s late spring in the Fortress of Meropide, and the air is blooming with that barely-noticeable sort of warmth that makes even stone feel kinder to the touch. The kind of day where dust drifts like dandelion fluff, sun catching on it just right, making the whole place feel haunted by something tender. Wriothesley doesn’t usually notice these things. He’s not in the habit of tracking softness in the stone walls that raised him. But Neuvillette is visiting.
Which is, of course, the problem.
“Your Grace,” Neuvillette says, and Wriothesley, who was until five seconds ago perfectly fine in both posture and mental clarity, manages to simultaneously lean too hard on the desk and fumble the porcelain teacup in his other hand.
It doesn’t shatter immediately. It hesitates, like a metaphor with too much poetic buildup, before hitting the floor.
Then it breaks.
“Oh,” Neuvillette says, blinking once, and kneels—not flinches, not gasps, not recoils from the mess, but kneels as if Wriothesley just dropped a law book and the world’s order depends on how quickly he can restore it.
Wriothesley stares down at the shards, wide-eyed, ears blooming red like a traitorous declaration. “I’ll get it,” he blurts, reaching at the same time and nearly knocking their foreheads together.
Neuvillette, composed as always, only stills him with a hand on his wrist. “It’s alright. Accidents happen.”
Wriothesley feels the pressure of his hand for far too long after it’s gone.
It becomes a pattern, if one can call complete emotional derailment a pattern. Wriothesley doesn’t mean to do it. He isn’t trying to be dramatic. He isn’t twelve anymore, and this isn’t schoolyard infatuation. It’s just—Neuvillette exists. He stands there in those finely tailored robes like elegance itself descended into the underbelly of Fontaine to deliver sentences with the weight of rivers behind them. He speaks with kindness so restrained it’s reverent. He looks at Wriothesley like he might actually be worth listening to.
It’s unfair, really.
The second teacup breaks during a question. Neuvillette had asked—genuinely asked, in that quiet thunder of a voice—what Wriothesley thought justice meant to someone who never had a choice in the first place.
Wriothesley, halfway into a sip, had choked, set the cup down too fast, and cracked the handle off against the saucer.
The third cup doesn’t even make it out of the cupboard. Wriothesley drops it when Neuvillette smiles at something he said. Smiles. Like a rare celestial event. Like a god remembering how to be gentle.
By the fourth time, Sigewinne’s stopped asking questions and just starts stockpiling the sturdy ceramic mugs meant for clumsy new inmates.
“He’s going to think you’re doing it on purpose,” she says one day, wiping up a spill Wriothesley didn’t have the reflexes to catch. “You know, to get his attention.”
“I am absolutely not—” Wriothesley starts, then stops, because what would that even look like? Hi, Neuvillette. Good to see you. By the way, I pulverized another piece of dinnerware because you said my handwriting was ‘elegant for someone in gloves.’
It’s humiliating.
It’s also weirdly addictive.
He tells himself it's not. He tells himself he’s moved on from that reckless, restless part of him that used to throw punches for feelings he didn’t have the language for. He’s a Duke now. He runs the Fortress with calm, practiced hands, delegates responsibility with care. He drinks tea like a civilized man. There are systems in place. He is not the sort of person who would destroy an entire beverage infrastructure because someone with tidewater eyes called him “remarkably thoughtful.”
Except, apparently, he is.
Wriothesley has never known himself to be gentle. But around Neuvillette, he tries. He sits straighter. He chooses his words more carefully. He lets silences stretch longer than he's used to, lets them breathe. He walks beside him without rushing ahead. He listens. Not just the sort of listening that passes for polite interest—he really listens. He doesn’t know when it started, or if it ever really did. It might just be that Neuvillette speaks in a way that makes everything feel like an answer, even when it’s a question.
It doesn’t help that Neuvillette keeps visiting.
Sometimes it’s official business. Judicial check-ins. Policy review. On rare occasions, it’s prisoner rehabilitation oversight—which is the only reason Neuvillette claims to be inspecting the courtyard garden Sigewinne talked Wriothesley into cultivating. But once, once, he came with no entourage. No clipboard. No briefing packet. Just himself, cloak tucked politely over one arm, saying, “I thought I might check in on your tea collection. I’ve heard you’ve expanded it.”
Wriothesley had to excuse himself for a full minute.
He had not, in fact, expanded his tea collection. Not intentionally. He just—well, sometimes people bring him things. A merchant grateful for the protection of the lower city. An inmate whose grandmother used to blend lavender with black tea and who wanted someone else to remember it too. He hadn’t realized how much it had grown. Until Neuvillette walked in and said, “This smells like summer rain,” and Wriothesley dropped the tin.
Neuvillette, unbothered, simply crouched and helped him collect the scattered leaves. “I didn’t know you had a preference for floral blends,” he said, soft. Curious. Like it mattered.
Wriothesley didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He was too busy trying to remember how words worked when all his thoughts were drowning in the image of Neuvillette, hair loose around his shoulders, gently gathering the fragments of something that had slipped from his hands.
Sigewinne starts labeling the mugs by durability rating. There’s a “High-Pressure Encounter” category now. One has a small frog drawn on it and the words For Court Dates Only.
Still, it continues.
The fifth cup is made of tin and dents instead of breaking. The sixth survives, but the saucer warps in Wriothesley’s grip. The seventh is wooden, and Wriothesley thinks, Finally, something foolproof, until Neuvillette asks if he’s ever considered writing a memoir, and he grips it so hard it splits at the seam.
By the eighth time, Neuvillette starts bringing his own cup.
Not a travel mug. Not something discreet. No, it’s delicate, hand-painted porcelain—ivory with blue curling vines—and he sets it down gently every time like a challenge.
Wriothesley wants to laugh. Or cry. Or ask him what in the name of the Archons he thinks he’s doing bringing something that beautiful into a room where Wriothesley is apparently a menace to teaware.
Instead, he says, “That looks expensive.”
Neuvillette tilts his head. “It was a gift. I thought you might like it.”
There’s a pause.
“I—what?”
“You always seem to be holding something fragile. I thought it might help to hold something beautiful instead.”
Wriothesley doesn’t break anything that day. He nearly breaks himself.
Later, in the privacy of his quarters, he finds the teacup’s outline still impressed into his thoughts. He tries to sketch it from memory, only to stop halfway through when he realizes he’s not drawing the cup—he’s drawing Neuvillette’s hands.
The next time Neuvillette visits, he brings a book. A slim volume of Fontaine poetry, old enough that the cover is faded to a soft grey-blue. He sets it on Wriothesley’s desk like it belongs there.
“I thought this line might speak to you,” he says, and taps the second stanza of a marked page with one finger.
It reads:
We do not hold water the way rivers do—
we carry it in cracked palms,
in cupped regrets,
in what we almost said.
Wriothesley has to look away.
He doesn’t say thank you. He just reads it three more times after Neuvillette is gone.
Sigewinne finds him staring at the page two hours later. “Oh,” she says brightly, “he left you another gift? At this rate, you’ll have a whole library. Maybe he’s trying to enrich your soul.”
Wriothesley mutters something about flood insurance.
“You could ask him to tea again,” Sigewinne suggests. “You know. Without breaking anything this time.”
“That’s optimistic of you.”
“Or you could just admit you like him.”
Wriothesley snorts. “What gave it away? The tea carnage? The poetry-induced paralysis?”
Sigewinne shrugs. “Mostly the fact that you started humming when I walked in.”
He is, in fact, humming.
The Fortress has never felt warmer. Not in temperature, exactly, but in texture. Like the walls are softening. Like the stone has memory, and it’s remembering gentleness. Wriothesley keeps walking slower through the halls. He lingers. He lets himself see things.
The rain that filters down through the grates in silver veins. The way steam curls like breath from the teacups that remain unbroken. The folded napkins Neuvillette always returns in perfect thirds.
There are ten cups now, casualties of some ongoing, undefined tenderness. Sigewinne has started calling it “The Porcelain Courtship.”
He glares at her for it, but doesn’t correct her.
Because something is shifting. Something is softening in him. He doesn’t know if Neuvillette feels it too. He doesn’t know what it means, this ache that keeps folding itself into quiet hours, into unspoken things, into too-gentle hands that linger on his wrist for just a second too long.
But when Neuvillette looks at him with that expression—like Wriothesley is some equation he enjoys solving slowly—Wriothesley thinks he might just break a hundred more teacups, if it means he gets to keep finding new ways to hold what he can’t say.
Just to see Neuvillette kneel for it.
Just to hear him say, again, “It’s alright.”
Just to believe it.
The eleventh cup survives the initial pour. It survives being carried, even, from the brewing alcove to the central table, balanced with something approaching reverence between Wriothesley’s gloved hands. Sigewinne had given it to him with a raised brow and a ribbon tied through the handle. It’s heavier than most, weighty ceramic with a clumsy glaze in stormy blues and earth tones. Handmade. Probably by one of the inmates. Definitely not Neuvillette’s taste. Which is exactly why Wriothesley picked it.
It is, in his mind, unbreakable.
He sets it on the table with ceremonial care. Tea first. Then sugar. Then the tiniest curl of steam like a sigh. Then, only then, he breathes.
Neuvillette hasn’t arrived yet.
Which gives him time. Not much, but enough to pace. Enough to reevaluate every decision he’s made in the past twenty-four hours. He hasn’t slept. Not well, anyway. He’d dreamed of things he wouldn’t admit aloud even if Sigewinne bribed him with plum wine and poetry. He’d dreamed in aqueducts and hands held too gently. He’d dreamed in silences that answered everything he never said.
The Fortress is too quiet this morning. Even the usual hiss of pipes feels distant. Like the place itself is holding its breath.
He’s just brushing nonexistent dust off the table for the fifth time when the knock comes.
Soft. Deliberate. Familiar.
“Come in,” he says, voice steady by force of will alone.
Neuvillette enters like he always does—like a storm passing through marble. He doesn’t so much walk as shift the gravity in the room. He’s not dressed formally, not today. No cravat. No robes. Just a long, dark coat over pale, ocean-washed linen. His hair is still damp at the ends. Wriothesley stares at that a moment too long.
“Good morning,” Neuvillette says.
And then—smiles.
Wriothesley almost drops the teacup anyway.
But no. He breathes through it. He gestures, sharp, a little too fast. “Tea’s ready. Take a seat, if you want.”
“I always do.”
It’s such an ordinary thing to say. But Neuvillette says it like a vow.
Wriothesley sits across from him, legs too long, hands too big, and wonders—again—how someone like him is allowed to be looked at like this. Like the man across from him sees the stone underneath the dust and calls it foundation, not ruin.
Neuvillette picks up the cup. Sips. Tilts his head.
“This is new.”
Wriothesley coughs. “Thought I’d try something sturdier. Just in case.”
A pause.
“In case of what?”
“…Gravity.”
Neuvillette lifts a brow. “Gravity seems to affect you selectively.”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
“I imagine you have.”
Another sip. Wriothesley watches the movement of his throat, the brief press of lips to ceramic, the way Neuvillette holds the cup with his fingers curled beneath it instead of around, like he’s cradling something alive. Wriothesley does not look at his hands. He does not.
“You’ve been… quiet lately,” Neuvillette says, setting the cup down with the softness of someone trained to hold worlds that aren’t his. “More than usual.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Not like this.”
There it is. The place the silence always leads to.
Wriothesley shrugs, not meeting his gaze. “Busy. You know how it is. Too many reports. Too many pipes. Too many inmates deciding the greenhouse is the perfect place to stage a philosophical rebellion.”
“I heard about that. Something about the ethics of cultivating roses in a prison?”
“They argued the thorns represented institutional hypocrisy.”
Neuvillette hums, a sound like rain catching in carved stone. “Did they win?”
“They made me water the roses twice a day. So, yes.”
Neuvilitte smiles again. Softer this time. Like something personal.
Wriothesley stares at the table. The edge of the cup. The way the steam curls like script he can’t read unless Neuvilitte speaks it first.
Then, too quiet: “You ever get tired of it?”
Neuvillette tilts his head. “Of roses?”
“Of pretending like all of this—” he gestures around vaguely “—like it doesn’t wear on you. Being the one who’s supposed to hold the order. Be calm. Be collected. Be… unbreakable.”
For once, Neuvillette doesn’t answer immediately. He leans back slightly, fingers still resting near the base of the cup.
“I used to think I had to be,” he says. “Especially when I first began. People look at me and expect certainty. Control. The embodiment of justice. They forget that I, too, have to navigate what cannot be solved with verdicts.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Is it?”
“To know you’re tired, too? Yeah. A little.”
A long moment. Then, in a voice gentler than Wriothesley has ever heard: “You’re not the only one who breaks things.”
Wriothesley laughs. Not a bark, not a scoff—laughs. It cracks something open in his chest. “Yeah, well. You do it metaphorically. I do it with my bare hands and the city’s porcelain budget.”
“You do it with care,” Neuvillette says. “Even when you’re breaking.”
There is nothing flippant in his tone. No teasing. Just the truth, laid bare like silver in the water.
Wriothesley can’t breathe.
“I’m not used to being seen like that,” he says. “Not here. Not anywhere.”
“I’ve always seen you.”
The cup doesn’t break.
The silence is not uncomfortable.
The steam doesn’t curl anymore—it lingers, suspended between them, like it’s listening too.
They talk. Not about laws. Not about logistics. Just talk. Books. Music. The way time moves slower underground. Neuvillette admits to disliking peaches. Wriothesley shares that he once tried to learn the violin and cracked the bridge on the first day. They laugh. Wriothesley catches himself watching the way Neuvillette’s eyes soften when amused. Neuvillette, in turn, seems utterly content to exist in this pocket of stillness, as if nothing beyond the Fortress exists.
Time folds around them.
Eventually, Neuvillette finishes his tea. He doesn’t immediately rise. Just traces the rim of the cup with one fingertip, thoughtful.
“You know,” he says, “I was thinking of returning next week.”
Wriothesley raises an eyebrow. “Something wrong with the tea this time?”
“On the contrary. I thought I might bring one of my own blends.”
“Another cup to destroy. Great.”
Neuvillette smiles. “I think I’d like to see what else you’ll do to avoid admitting you care.”
Wriothesley nearly chokes.
Neuvillette stands. Retrieves his coat. Smooths the fabric with delicate precision.
He pauses at the door.
“Wriothesley.”
“Yeah?”
“I look forward to the twelfth cup.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
Wriothesley is left staring at the table, the empty cup, the place where steam once curled.
He does not move for a very long time.
When Sigewinne walks in twenty minutes later, she stops in the doorway, watches him.
“So,” she says. “Was that a date?”
“I don’t know,” he says, voice a little hoarse. “But if it was, I think I survived it.”
She walks up to the table, picks up the intact cup, holds it in both hands like a miracle.
“You didn’t even crack it,” she says.
“No,” he says. “But I think I cracked.”
She beams. “It’s about time.”
And maybe it is.
Because something’s shifting now—no longer just a pattern of broken cups and silent pining, but the beginning of something whole. Something warm. Something he doesn’t have to shatter to feel.
Something he can hold.
Even if his hands still tremble.
---
It’s alright, Neuvillette had said.
And maybe it is. Maybe it is, even when Wriothesley doesn’t believe it—especially when he doesn’t. Maybe that’s the worst of it: that Neuvillette keeps insisting on kindness in places Wriothesley has already boarded shut, long since declared condemned.
The Fortress of Meropide was not built for tenderness. It devours softness. It eats it whole. But somehow Neuvillette walks through its iron throat as if the place is cathedral, not prison, and Wriothesley—
Wriothesley keeps finding himself on his knees, metaphorically or otherwise, gathering pieces of himself in the aftermath of something that never quite felt like a disaster.
He thinks of the poetry line again. We do not hold water the way rivers do.
Of course not.
Rivers are patient. Purposeful. They know their direction.
He, on the other hand, is a man who has broken eleven teacups and counting for no greater reason than that Neuvillette sometimes smiles.
And now, Neuvillette has started writing him letters.
Not long ones. Not official communiqués. Just—scraps of thought, folded like offerings. One will arrive with a courier bearing prison records, tucked between reports. Another will be pressed into the inside cover of a returned book. Sometimes they’re barely a sentence.
“I found this passage evocative. Thought you might too.”
“The tea you sent me tastes like late summer. I hope you’ve been resting.”
“Do you suppose justice can exist in silence?”
Wriothesley never knows how to respond.
He does anyway. He writes back with blunt, inelegant honesty, trying not to sound like a man who rereads every phrase five times and edits for tone. Neuvillette never comments on the handwriting (which is in gloves, thank you very much) or the messiness of his phrasing. He just writes back. Again. Again.
It builds, like pressure behind a dam.
Spring slides into early summer. The Fortress grows humid. Even stone sweats here. Prisoners move slower. Guards roll their sleeves up. Wriothesley stops wearing his coat inside. And through all of it, the visits continue. The teacups become sturdier. He doesn’t drop one for several weeks. It’s—strangely worse.
Because now he’s not distracted by panic. Now he notices everything. The way Neuvillette unbuttons the top clasp of his robe when he sits. The way his voice lowers in the echo of the cell corridors, like water folding in on itself. The way he occasionally leans in, just enough to send Wriothesley’s thoughts scrambling like inmates after a blackout.
He survives this for exactly eleven days before Sigewinne threatens to lock him in solitary—not for misconduct, but for denial.
"You're going to combust," she says, hands on her hips, watching him stare vacantly out the window where Neuvillette just walked past. “You keep looking at him like a man watching a storm roll in, then refusing to close the windows.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wriothesley lies, sipping from a very unbroken mug.
Sigewinne raises an eyebrow. “Do you want me to draw you a chart? A pie graph? A psych profile? Because I will.”
He groans. “There’s nothing to be done. It’s—”
“What, impossible? Forbidden? Unrequited?” she ticks them off on her fingers. “You know those are plots, not excuses, right?”
Wriothesley rubs a hand down his face. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” she says cheerfully. “You’re doomed.”
She pauses. “But I’ll help anyway. Because I believe in doomed romance.”
Which is, apparently, how Wriothesley finds himself being cornered into planning something. Something ridiculous. Something unhinged. Something wildly out of his depth.
A tea date.
Not an incidental tea conversation. Not tea between reports. Not “I happened to have the kettle on and you walked in.” No. An intentional, real invitation.
For once, no prison formality. No legal excuse. No excuse at all.
“Just say you’d like to talk,” Sigewinne insists, scribbling on a notepad. “Everyone likes talking. Especially with someone they’re obviously—”
“I will silence you.”
“You won’t. Because deep down, you want me to make you do this.”
Wriothesley glares. “What if he says no?”
She tilts her head. “Has he said no to anything yet?”
…Fair point.
So Wriothesley does the unthinkable. He writes a note.
Neuvillette,
If you’re free tomorrow, I’d like to share tea with you. No paperwork. Just… conversation. I understand if you’re busy. But I’d like the chance to talk without pretense. Or breaking anything, hopefully.
—W.
He stares at it for forty-five minutes before sealing the envelope.
The wait is excruciating.
He tells himself it doesn’t matter. That it’s fine either way. That they’re friends. Colleagues. That Neuvillette doesn’t owe him anything. That he’s prepared for disappointment.
He is not.
The answer arrives in pale blue ink.
Of course. I would be honored.
Wriothesley rereads it so many times it starts to etch itself into his bones.
He doesn’t sleep that night.
Not for lack of trying. He turns off the lights. He lays down. He closes his eyes. And yet—
The thought won’t let go.
Of course.
I would be honored.
It echoes in his chest like a bell, low and reverent, vibrating against ribs that have never quite known how to hold tenderness without bracing for collapse. Wriothesley lies in the dark and tries to imagine what that will even look like—Neuvillette, across from him, no pretense, no reason to be there except because he wants to. Because he said yes.
Wriothesley, in all his years underground, has never been so terrified by something that feels so gentle.
Morning arrives with a hush.
Even the pipes seem to quiet themselves, as if they, too, are waiting.
Sigewinne shows up with a tray and two fresh mugs—thick, white clay, smooth with no glaze, handmade by the same inmate who did the storm-blue one.
“These are for emergencies,” she says, setting them down with the gravity of an oath. “Not the romantic kind. The breaking-things kind.”
“I haven’t broken one in weeks.”
“And yet,” she says, already fluffing the napkins.
She helps him arrange the table, too. Not overdone—just enough. A vase, single sprig of wild mint. Cloth folded neatly at the corners. One pot, no spout chips. She even brings sugar cubes shaped like little seashells and sets them down like they’re diplomatic offerings.
“I don’t know if I should thank you or declare this a conspiracy.”
“Why not both?” she says, patting his shoulder. “Good luck not imploding.”
He doesn’t answer.
Neuvillette arrives exactly on time.
Of course he does. Of course he does.
He’s dressed simply again—light grey, soft collar, something in the structure of the coat that suggests ease rather than rigidity. And yet he still manages to look like someone who walks through moonlight rather than under it. He’s carrying a tin. Tea leaves, Wriothesley assumes. The label is faded, hand-written. He wants to ask where it’s from, but the question lodges itself in the back of his throat, caught behind the shape of he came.
Neuvillette nods once, then sets the tin down between them like a promise.
“I thought we might try something gentler today. Linden, lavender, and lemon peel.”
“Sounds like something that belongs in a poem,” Wriothesley says, only realizing after the fact that it sounded a little like flirting.
Neuvillette doesn’t blink. “Would you like one?”
“…A poem?”
“A cup.”
“Oh.”
There’s a pause.
Then Neuvillette smiles.
It’s small. Subtle. But it’s there.
“I wouldn’t mind a poem, either,” he says.
Wriothesley swears his soul short-circuits.
He moves stiffly, clumsily. Pours the water with more concentration than he’s ever dedicated to any crime ring in the history of Fontaine. He adds the leaves, stirs, tries not to knock anything over. He forgets, for a moment, that he’s wearing gloves, and nearly burns himself when he presses his fingers to the side of the pot.
“Careful,” Neuvillette says, reaching across the table, taking Wriothesley’s wrist with bare, cool fingers.
It’s not the touch that wrecks him—it’s the way Neuvillette holds him there, thumb resting just shy of his pulse, like he’s not restraining him but reminding him.
“You don’t have to be so restrained,” Neuvillette says.
“I do,” Wriothesley replies, before he can stop himself. “If I’m not, things break.”
Another pause.
Then: “You’ve lasted this long. And this,” Neuvillette gestures faintly at the table, the pot, the room, himself, “is not fragile.”
Wriothesley swallows. “Feels like it is.”
“Even porcelain learns how to bear heat.”
And there it is again—that quiet sort of truth Neuvillette wields like a river: patient, steady, devastating.
They drink in silence at first.
Then in sips, in intervals, in conversation.
They talk about the tea. About the blend. Neuvillette mentions that linden is good for calming nerves, and Wriothesley chokes on his first swallow. They talk about books again. About the flood system beneath the city. About whether or not frogs have a justice system.
“I think they do,” Neuvillette says.
“Oh?”
“They return to the same pond every year. That kind of loyalty implies structure.”
Wriothesley laughs. “What happens when one breaks the rules?”
“A formal ribbiting.”
He nearly spills the cup.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Wriothesley gasps, actually gasps, as Neuvillette reaches calmly for another sugar shell.
“I have a sense of humor.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. You simply don’t notice when you’re busy staring at my mouth.”
Silence.
Absolute.
Unforgiving.
Unrelenting.
Wriothesley blinks. Slowly. Very, very slowly.
Neuvillette raises the cup to his lips, unbothered.
“Would you like more tea?” he asks.
“I—”
“I brought enough for a second pot.”
Wriothesley says nothing. He’s still trying to determine whether or not he’s hallucinating.
“I’m joking, of course,” Neuvillette adds after a moment. “Mostly.”
“I—”
Neuvillette sets the cup down. His eyes are soft. But there’s a tension there now, not sharp, not dangerous—waiting.
“I’ve been told,” he says quietly, “that I don’t always express interest in the expected ways. That I speak too much in implication. But I don’t want you to misunderstand.”
Wriothesley swallows. “Misunderstand what?”
“That I enjoy this. You. That I want more.”
It should be so simple. It is simple. But it hits Wriothesley like surf breaking against stone, over and over and over.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says hoarsely.
“Neither do I,” Neuvillette says. “But I’d like to do it with you.”
The tea between them steams gently.
Wriothesley reaches—across the table, through the thundering chaos in his own chest—and touches Neuvillette’s hand.
Just the edge.
Just enough.
“I’m going to break something,” he whispers.
Neuvillette’s fingers curl slowly around his.
“I’ll help you pick it up.”
The silence after is full. Brimming. Thick as floodwater, delicate as steam, trembling at the edges like a dam that’s forgotten how to hold.
They don’t move, not at first.
The contact is light—barely there—but somehow Wriothesley feels it everywhere. The press of Neuvillette’s fingers against his, steady and reverent, is louder than any storm he’s weathered. His hands, so used to wielding strength, to gripping too hard and holding too little, go still. He doesn’t dare breathe. Not in case it startles the moment into vanishing. Not in case it changes anything.
But Neuvillette doesn’t let go.
Instead, his thumb sweeps a slow arc across the back of Wriothesley’s hand. Thoughtful. Patient. As if memorizing him by texture. As if saying: I’m here. I will stay. You don’t have to flinch.
Wriothesley laughs once, short and helpless, a sound born of disbelief and need. His voice shakes. “You’re either braver than I thought, or more reckless.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I’ve been worse,” Wriothesley mutters, almost without thinking, and immediately regrets it. But Neuvillette doesn’t wince. Doesn’t correct. Doesn’t retreat.
Instead, he tilts his head, studies him like a riddle he’s already decided is worth solving. “You’ve also been patient,” he says. “Attentive. Generous. Terrified. And careful.” His voice lowers, warm with something that feels like grief softened by adoration. “I have never been so carefully handled in all my life.”
Wriothesley looks at him then. Really looks.
The steam has faded. The tea is cooling. The table between them is cluttered with history and hesitation and hope—but none of that matters. Not now. Not when Neuvillette’s expression is this open, this steady, like he’s offering not forgiveness but recognition. Like he’s never been more certain of anything.
And gods help him—Wriothesley wants.
He wants like he’s never let himself before. He wants in a way that aches, that doesn’t ask for permission, that pulses beneath his skin like something ancient remembering how to bloom.
There are moments that feel like they split the world cleanly in two—before and after.
This is one of them.
Not dramatic. Not loud. Just a single breath, caught between steam and skin, between the air that hangs trembling and the silence they share like a held breath. Wriothesley doesn’t speak. He couldn’t if he tried. His fingers are wrapped in Neuvillette’s now, and the warmth there is real, undeniable, a new weight anchoring him to the moment like a lighthouse to the cliff edge.
He thinks: This is happening.
He thinks: I’m not ready for this.
He thinks: I’ve been waiting for this my entire life.
Neuvillette doesn’t pull away. If anything, he leans in—not far, not a plunge, just a slow tilt forward like a wave rising toward the shore. His hair catches the light. His eyes are unreadable and clear, still water hiding immeasurable depth. Wriothesley wonders, absurdly, if this is what it feels like to drown without dying. If drowning could ever feel like being held.
“I’m afraid,” Wriothesley says, quiet. It slips out like truth always does—reluctantly, aching.
Neuvillette doesn’t flinch. “So am I.”
It’s not what Wriothesley expects. And that’s what breaks him, finally. That he’s not alone in it. That someone like him—someone made of prison bars and grit and half-swallowed damage—is allowed this. Allowed a moment where the air doesn’t hurt to breathe, where the silence doesn’t bite, where fear isn’t a precursor to disappointment but something shared, softened, understood.
His voice comes rough around the edges. “Then let me do this before I lose the nerve.”
He rises, slow as a tide, still holding Neuvillette’s hand. Their fingers tangle. Neither of them lets go.
Neuvillette tilts his chin up—not much, just a little—and Wriothesley can see it in his eyes now, the flicker of anticipation, the permission written not in words but in stillness. In the way he doesn’t move away. In the way he waits.
Wriothesley takes one step closer. Then another. His free hand comes up—hesitating near Neuvillette’s cheek, unsure. He waits, just in case, but Neuvillette turns into it, just barely, just enough, and suddenly it’s easy.
Frightening. Fragile.
But easy.
He kisses him.
It’s a reverent thing. A test of pressure. A question asked in the language of breath and proximity. Wriothesley kisses like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to, and Neuvillette answers like yes. Like he’s been waiting for the question. Like it’s been echoing between them since the first broken cup, the first lingering glance, the first silence they shared and didn’t explain.
Neuvillette kisses back with the patience of someone who has weathered centuries of storms and finally found shelter. His hand slides up to Wriothesley’s collar, just a brush, just enough to anchor them both. He breathes into the space between them like a promise.
When they part, it’s not far. Their foreheads touch. Their hands stay linked. Wriothesley’s eyes are still closed.
He opens them slowly, half-afraid of what he’ll see.
But Neuvillette’s still there.
Still close.
Still smiling.
“I didn’t break anything,” Wriothesley says, dazed.
Neuvillette exhales a soft laugh, almost a sigh. “Not even yourself.”
Wriothesley opens his eyes. “Yet.”
“That,” Neuvillette says, “is my specialty.”
They stand like that for a while. Breathing. Letting the Fortress fall away around them. Letting the world forget its need for structure and severity. Letting it be soft, just this once. Just here.
When they sit back down, they’re still touching. Not in a possessive way. Just contact. Palm to palm. Elbow to elbow. Enough to say we are here. Enough to say this is real.
The tea is cold by then. Neither of them cares.
---
The days after are not perfect.
There is awkwardness. There are pauses too long and touches too brief. Wriothesley still fumbles things. Neuvillette still has to return to the opera of law and justice and solemnity that defines his daily life. But something has shifted now, irrevocably. The Fortress is no longer just a place of containment. It is, in some quiet and unlikely way, a place of return.
Neuvillette keeps returning.
He brings new teas. He brings books. He brings poems. Once, he brings a second pillow.
Wriothesley never asks what that means.
He doesn’t need to.
Sometimes, they don’t talk at all. Sometimes, they just sit near one another, one reading, one polishing gauntlets, no pretense. Just comfort.
Sometimes, Wriothesley reaches out and brushes Neuvillette’s knuckles with the back of his hand and is met with a smile, or a kiss to the temple, or a quiet sound of contentment.
Sigewinne, naturally, claims all the credit.
She stages an elaborate ceremony in the infirmary with cake, party hats, and a poster board titled Congrats, You Finally Stopped Breaking My Teacups.
Wriothesley rolls his eyes.
Neuvillette helps decorate.
And on a shelf behind Wriothesley’s desk, thirteen cups sit side by side.
Twelve of them are chipped, cracked, or partially glued back together. One is pristine. The newest.
The one he kissed Neuvillette over.
He doesn’t plan to use it.
Some things aren’t meant to be broken.
Some things are meant to be kept.
It turns out love isn’t some grand confession or earthshaking revelation.
Sometimes, it’s just a hand on your wrist when you’re trembling.
Sometimes, it’s the stillness between two breaths.
Sometimes, it’s a cup that finally stays whole.
And a kiss that finally doesn’t shatter anything.
Only seals it.
Like steam in the air.
Like rain on the stone.
Like a promise poured into porcelain.
And finally, finally, held.