serial procrastinator

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Jean and Dvalin arrive at the Nameless Island moments after the whirlwind erupts.

She isn't entirely sure what's happening even as they land. Dvalin had touched down at Windrise frantic as she's never seen him, all but dragging her onto his back and refusing to divert to Mondstadt for anyone else. "We have no time. That *fool* thinks to divest the Authority upon me. There is only one way that has ever been done, and it will end him."

Which, even half-understood, leaves Jean's heart in her throat as Dvalin dives at the whirlwind. He's roaring a denial largely lost in its screaming force. She clings on tight, ducks her head low, and glimpses, as they pierce the gale, her beloved archon in his full regalia, wings outstretched, harp in hand, eyes glad and sad and knowing all at once-

His fingers ripple across the strings. Dvalin is flung back, landing heavily and rolling on the cracked and ancient stone. He twists to avoid pinning Jean beneath him, and Jean leaps free. When she scrambles to her feet and looks to him, he's surrounded by the clean pure glow of Anemo, gusts of wind caging his limbs, his wings, his head and neck and thrashing tail, pinning him to the ground as the glow grows brighter and brighter yet.

"*Stop him!*" he bellows at her through the whirling teal that holds him back.

Taking a deep breath, Jean nods, then turns back to the storm.

It doesn't part for her easily. Her Vision seems to be fighting her, its Anemo resisting her pull, then surrendering, then hardening again. The wind tears at her clothes, wrenches the ribbon from her hair, pulls her cape tight until it chokes her and she has to undo the brooch at her neck and let it fly away. Gritting her teeth, she bows her head and fights her way through the whirling storm.

At the last, close enough that she can see the outlines of that beloved figure through the raised dust and the Anemo glow, her Vision pulls back against her again, and she hears the shift in both the song and the screeching wind it's carried on. Jean tenses, ducks low, and hurls herself forward, rolling across the ground before the wind can catch her upright form, sliding beneath the furious gust that would have flung her back just as it had Dvalin.

On the other side, Lord Barbatos, Venti, the laughing little bard and wise-eyed archon who had sung at her window and sat with her beneath Vennessa's tree and insisted she share his wine at the tavern, who had pressed kisses to her skin and giggled as he composed extemporaneous verses for her in the afterglow, is coming apart. His wings are more light than feather, and each plume of that glow tattering away into streamers of Anemo; the rest of him is translucent, that same light shining from beneath the skin. His braids are unraveling into wisps of teal. Only his eyes seem *real* any longer, still glad and sad and knowing when they meet her own.

"Jean!" he exclaims in startling and incongruous delight. "Isn't that poetic? Gunnhildr saw me take Dvalin's power, and now you'll see me let it go."

"Lord Barbatos." Jean pushes herself to her feet. He keeps strumming the harp, though its song grows softer, enough so that she doesn't have to shout. "*Venti. Whatever you are doing, it need not happen so. If you *do* have Dvalin's power--this is not necessary. He does not wish you to die for it."

The wind is pressing in around them, the eye of this storm shrinking as the breeze draws in close. Jean takes a step towards Barbatos, then another, and then she's very nearly below him as he bows low to smile down upon her from where he hovers in the air. The song still hums around her; the glowing feathers of his wings are in utter tatters now.

"I'm not *dying*, Jean," he says, and then spears the brief hope of that through with, "no more than Vennessa did! There's a place on the wind for me. There just won't be a throne."

Jean still doesn't understand entirely what's happening here, but she doesn't have to. "There has to be another way."

"We all spent long enough looking! Except Focalors, but she had a few more birds to hit with that particular stone. Now that she's set it off, though, there's not much time left to look, and I had other things to use it on. Durin, the Mare Jivari, spending just a little more time with my new favorite Gunnhildr...."

He leans in further. The fingers that cup her cheek are ghostly, barely more than the brush of a breeze. His lips, touching hers, are barely more substantial. Jean tastes him more than feels him, the perfume of cecilia flowers flooding her lungs when she gasps. There are tears prickling in her eyes, which she only realizes when a gentle breath of wind dashes them away.

Lord Barbatos lifts his head, breaking the kiss. There are tears in his eyes, too, though he's still smiling, and there's still that gladness intermixed with the sorrow.

"Last daughter of my first priestess," he says, with the solemnity of an archon, and then, with the gentle warmth of a fondly drunken bard, "Jean... look after Mondstadt, okay? Dvalin will help, but he's going to have a lot to get used to, and I know my people will be safe in your hands."

And then the wind is all around them, unraveling him quickly and neatly as a gale stripping clean a dandelion. For all its swiftness, it passes over Jean's skin like a last and lingering caress.

It fades quickly, taking the last ribbons of glowing teal with it. There's a rumble behind her, then the click of claws on stone and a shadow looming overhead. Jean can't bear to look at him as she sinks onto her knees again, a sob rising in her throat. "I couldn't stop him," she chokes out. "I'm sorry."

"No." His voice is low and hollowed-out with pain. Breezes swirl around him as he moves, one clawed foot settling beside her, a glowing wing curling around. "Don't be. He was...." A heavy sigh, picking up her abandoned cape from wherever it had fallen and sending it sailing out, flapping, far over the sea. "I know him far too well. He was planning this for a very long time. Far longer than you have even been alive. Possibly longer than I have." He bows his head low until the feathering along his jaw brushes her hair. "I am sorry, too."