Your husband is dead.
One son is broken, the other has been scattered to the winds.
Diluc refuses to tell you where Kaeya has vanished to, and his face is a visage of such dark tragedy and pain whenever you bring up his brother's name that you've stopped asking him all together.
You hover in the doorway, watching your son fall into an unreachable sleep. You can hear Diluc muttering as he stirs under the sheets, but you can't reach him. You can't reach anyone. It feels like you're drowning. The waves spin you over and over until you don't know which way is up.
Your family is wilting like your garden, the bright, fragrant blooms now withering away before your eyes. You had tended to it together with Crepus, and now, wrapped up in the throes of grief, it goes neglected. You can't bear to return to it. You can feel his presence stronger there than anywhere else. You remember colour and the scent of flowers and grass and dirt. Most of all, you remember placing your hands over his to guide them as you planted seeds and patted damp earth over them. Now, it's a ghost of a place, now filled with ghosts of its own, and you don't know how to revive them. You don't know what to do.
No.
That's not quite true.
You might be Crepus' wife, and he's managed to temper your sharpened edges, absolved the sins staining your hands with nothing but love and tenderness, but you'd also been the Tsaritsa's Harbinger, and whether you like it or not, she's had a hand in shaping you into a weapon of war as well.
At your command, the woods begin to whisper, the Vision clasped to your wrist now glowing a bright, poisonous green. The vines hanging on the trees bend to your every whim, curling and unfurling from the trunks of trees and from the brambles like bent, crooked fingers. These vines now wrap around the neck of the struggling Fatui agent, his garbled pleas for mercy the only sounds breaking the cool silence of the night air.
Anger clouds your vision, betraying your expression carved from ice. Where was the mercy he had shown your husband and son? Your pain, your rage, your despair – you use all of that, channelling your grief into muscle tension and a glare, willing him the very pain he'd inflicted onto your family. In response, the vines coil even tighter around his throat, his voice gradually fading away, until it too is swallowed up by the silence.
You leave his body to be consumed by the woods.
You walk back home, one slow, laboured step at the time. The first pincers of early morning light are needling open the sky. The cold wraps itself around your skin, caressing your sides and shoulders like hands. Droplets of rain pelt down like tiny shards of shrapnel, ricocheting in all directions, hitting your velvet cloak and flecking it with the damp.
A poor replacement for warm arms wrapping themselves around your body, his kisses raining over you like stars.
You've expected the raw heat of your agony to abate after the execution of your husband's murderer, but it hasn't. It just makes it worse; searing through your body and robbing you of your breath. Pain splinters through your chest as you shatter. Your heart withers and cracks, falling in pieces around you.
You brush your fingers across the golden band of your wedding ring, and you slip it off. It feels cold in your hand. "You really aren't returning to me, are you?"
Your only answer is silence.
