Rest for the wicked

Four hours was all they got, and most of it was them taking care of him.

Aether was not spent in the way a night in the arena spent him. The Flame still sat in his blood, stupidly willing. What it could not fix was the hole in his sleep. Three hours the night before, a bungalow circuit before that, and a body that had started answering out of habit instead of hunger. The women saw it. They stopped asking him to perform and started servicing him instead — slow mouths, unhurried hands, Ganyu nuzzling along his thigh like she could apologize for being so loud earlier, Barbara careful and sweet, Lisa’s dominance folded down into something almost kind. Pity, if pity could be this wet and this fond.

Rosaria watched the clock in her head and did not like the numbers.

When the fourth hour thinned out she put a hand on his chest and ended it.

“Enough,”
she said, and it was not a request.
“You’re dropping. Lie down.”

He started to argue on principle. She pulled his head into her lap before the sentence finished, fingers already in his hair, rings cool against his scalp. The others took the hint without being told. Lisa found her book again. Ganyu settled against his legs, quiet now, a warm weight instead of a demand. Barbara fetched water and then did not know where to put herself until Rosaria jerked her chin at the far side of the bed.

Aether went under faster than he meant to. The last clear thing was his fiancée’s palm stroking the same path over and over, the low, unused-to-softness murmur she only used when no one needed her to be the head of the pride.

“Sleep. I’ll break the next one if they try to drag you out.”

He believed her.

He was still there, face in her lap, when the knock came — sharp, polite, and completely uninterested in whether the man inside had finished resting. Fontaine accents filtered through the wood. Rosaria’s hand stilled in his hair, then resumed, slower, as she looked toward the door like she was deciding whether to answer it or throw a spear through it.

The kiss that woke him was almost nothing.

Rosaria’s mouth brushed his like she was afraid of startling him, warm and unhurried, the kind of kiss she only used when the room still belonged to the two of them. Aether surfaced into it slowly — the weight of her lap, the smell of her skin, the last of the sleep clinging to the corners of his vision. She waited until his eyes actually focused. Then she tipped her head toward the far side of the room, a small, private nod that said look, and they waited, and I allowed this.

Four women stood there in a polite little cluster, none of them foolish enough to interrupt a nun with her fiancé’s head in her lap.

Navia was impossible to miss first: gold and black, the complicated architecture of a dress that looked like it had been engineered rather than sewn, a smile already loaded for public use. Emilie stood a half-step behind her with the composed stillness of someone who catalogued rooms for a living. Chevreuse had her weight on the balls of her feet, musket-not-present but the posture still there, eyes tracking Aether’s hands as if they might become a problem. Lynette occupied the least space of the four, ears angled, expression unreadable, already having decided the temperature of the room before anyone spoke.

Rosaria kissed Aether’s forehead once more, stood, and left the bed with the unhurried dignity of a woman who had not been dismissed so much as she had finished her shift. The Fontaine group did not move until the door clicked behind her.

Navia took the floor like she had been born on a stage.

“Monsieur Traveler,”
she said, and even the title sounded like it came with a ribbon on it.
“Navia. President of the Spina di Rosula — though today I am simply a guest, and very pleased to be one.”
She gestured with an open hand, each introduction crisp enough for a boardroom.
“Emilie, our perfumer, and a woman of extraordinary discretion. Chevreuse, captain of the Special Security and Surveillance Patrol, who has kindly agreed to keep me from being kidnapped, stabbed, or otherwise inconvenienced. And Lynette, of the Hotel Bouffes d’ete — if something in this room is a trick, she will notice it first.”
A small, glittering pause.
“We thought it proper to introduce ourselves as if we had not already read about you over breakfast for months.”

Aether sat up, still half in the dent Rosaria had left in the sheets, and rubbed a hand over his face.

“I’ve never been to Fontaine.”

“No,”
Navia agreed, delighted.
“And yet you have been on the front page often enough that half the women in the Court could pick you out of a crowd. The papers are shameless. Conquest of Liyue. The Shogun’s new decree. An entire Akademiya taking leave of its senses on the same afternoon.”
She ticked them off on gloved fingers like agenda items.
“They print you the way they print fashion weeks and opera scandals. You are, I am afraid, something of a celebrity among us. It would have been rude not to come and see if the print lived up to the man.”

Emilie’s mouth curved, faint and professional.

Aether looked at Navia while she was still mid-presentation, still sparkling, still holding the room like a contract negotiation, and decided the meeting had gone on long enough.

He caught her by the waist.

(https://im.ge/i/QQQvo1J)
(artist: miyu)

The sound she made was surprised and not at all displeased. Complicated dress or not, the architecture of it started coming apart under his fingers — clasps, ties, the ridiculous pretty engineering that had been designed to be seen and not, apparently, to survive a man who had just been told he was famous for exactly this. Gold fabric loosened. Black lining slipped. Navia’s laugh broke warm against his cheek as he pulled her in between his knees.

“Monsieur—”

“You came to see if the print was accurate,”
he said.
“Easier if the dress isn’t in the way.”

Chevreuse’s face did something pained. It was the specific expression of a bodyguard watching her principal get reeled onto a bed by a stranger the papers had turned into a myth, every trained instinct screaming to intervene and every social reality forbidding it. Her hand twitched. She did not step forward. She did not stop him. She just stood there looking like this was going to be a very long report.

(https://im.ge/i/QQQvQpa)
(artist: miyu)

Navia, for her part, let herself be drawn in. The last of the formal smile turned real. One gloved hand braced on his shoulder while he worked another fastening loose, the president of the Spina di Rosula discovering in real time that celebrity had teeth.

“Well,”
she murmured, a little breathless already. “I did say I wanted to verify the headlines.”