#lisajean

“Lisa…Hello,” said Jean. Her hands were hidden out of sight, behind her back, but Lisa already knew. In Jean’s fidgeting, a small flash of familiar purple bled through, bunched up together. Sheepishly, the Acting Grandmaster said in a soft voice (Lisa had never heard her use that voice with anyone but herself, and it made her heart flutter), “I wanted to pay you a personal visit, for the occasion.” 

Lisa sighed. “Don’t be so formal darling, it’s called a birthday party.” Jean gulped in response, then cleared her throat. 

“Anyway…I’m glad you could come, Jean. I’ve missed you,” Lisa said gently, as if to a scared, wounded animal. Jean’s face dusted itself pink.  Tentatively, Lisa extended her arms forward in the motion of a hug but not quite making contact yet, and asked, “Touch?” Jean nodded, almost a little too eagerly. As Lisa nuzzled affectionately into her side, the witch couldn’t help the thought passing of ‘my knight’. And whenever she’s ready…My girl.

After the embrace, one that Lisa wished could have lasted for as long as the universe remained standing, a playful look came upon her face. “So…That gift of yours. Hidden so inconspicuously. ” Delaying no longer, Jean brought out the bouquet, and whatever parts of Lisa’s heart were frozen solid suddenly melted away. Sumeru roses.

Lisa took it, examining each furl and petal with care. The most vibrant shade of purple she had ever seen on a flower - and one that she treasured like no other. “I saw you were reading a book about herbology so I…Thought it might be a good gift, my apologies if it is inappropriate.”

The emerald of her eyes sparkled with delight. “They’re perfect, Jean Gunnhildr. You know me well and…my love for pretty things.” A veil seemed to cast around her gaze as she reached a hand to brush briefly against the other woman’s. There was a hitch in Jean’s voice that stirred excitement in Lisa.  

For a while Jean was silent as they rested in each other’s embrace, before the knight whispered back, with a boldness Lisa was not expecting, “Well…Is this pretty little thing to your taste?” The conversation had dropped from the flowers to a simple scene of two women in each other’s arms, sharing a moment only the two of them were ever to know. Lisa smirked. Jean’s attempts at flirting were the sweetest words she’s ever heard from the stoic knight. 

“Perhaps we should continue this conversation over a warm cup of tea,” Lisa purred, stroking Jean by the cheek. Jean, attempting to stay stone-faced, simply nodded. “Yes…yes, tea would be wonderful.”

The flowers started them all. Those gorgeous, beautiful, cursed flowers. Blossoming and tangling around her heart - no matter how she pruned them, they never stopped growing. Never stopped hurting. Beautiful to look back upon, but a bitter reminder of everything that could have been that was not. 

It had been years since the divorce. Lisa Minci had been managing on her own, running her own library outside the affiliation of the Knights of Favonius. She couldn’t stand to see the face again of the woman she thought loved her. That had been proven to be untrue. Jean had made many promises of a forever with each other, of their own happily-ever-after, after the stirrings in Teyvat were to calm down. They would have the soft, simple, sweet life of their dreams.

Instead of building that life together however, other things had to get in the way. It was always meeting this, reports over here and there to sign, hilichurl attack down by the farmlands, political disputes, trade and economics, and the like. It took Lisa a while to wake up to it all. To all the nights she woke up to empty bed sheets beside her, of attempts of intimacy rebuffed out of the other party’s exhaustion at the end of the day, talking of nothing but the problems that she bore on her shoulders. Jean was just a young woman with a Herculean task of running a city. And Lisa was a woman with little time left in the world, and was left spending it alone not physically, but emotionally. The distance, the distance…So close yet so far away. How bitter she had become over the last years of their union. 

It was date night, Lisa’s birthday once more, the time it happened. Lisa was dressed in an extravagant green dress, glittering as she twirled herself around. A private section of the restaurant, just for the two of them, to surprise her wife with a treat after a long day’s work.

Only, there was nobody to come greet her this time. Hours ticked by as swift as a fleet-footed fox, and Lisa idly played with purple strands of electricity among her fingers. She should have seen this coming. She was a fool. A fool to think that that woman could truly love anything but her career, and her people. In the recent months, Lisa had become just that - just another citizen with problems to be cared for and addressed. Their interactions…The same cycle over and over again, with nothing learned, no growth on either side. They were two sides of the same coin. And that coin was starting to rust over. Just another penny down the gutter - nothing special. 

When Jean did arrive, panting and sweaty from running through the streets of Mondstadt, the restaurant was closed. Lisa was standing outside, pelted by rain. One could practically feel the electro energy reverberating around her.  Jean’s apologies came first, her pleas for Lisa to be understanding of what was important to her.

Lisa cackled, a witch’s cackle that sent Jean goosebumps. “So it really is true…No matter what happens, no matter what I do, no matter how much I tell you how you’re destroying yourself with the life you’re living…You never listen."

A lightning storm brewed overhead. "I’ve worked so hard to be with you Jean, and the thing about you is that you never change." Lisa had about her the look of a broken woman, speaking softly, but not gently. "Always so steadfast, so steady. I love you for it. I loved you for it.” The last words came out of Lisa crackling in an emotional rasp. Jean simply stared, dumbfounded.

“You feel like a stranger in my bed, mutterings of documents to submit and time to run after." It hurt Lisa to say it. How many times had she told her in confidence, in hushed whispers curled up to the sound of each other's fragile heartbeats, how little time she had left?

"So much so that I don’t remember who the woman I fell in love with is anymore.” 

Jean attempted to speak, to speak in her defense, but Lisa silenced her with a hush. “This was the last chance, Gunnhildr. To prove that we could make this work. And it doesn’t. So I’m done.” The words almost dragged her insides straight out of her ribcage, but she ignored the throbbing feeling in her chest. Shaking her head, Lisa walked away, presumably to head home. Jean stood there stupefied, the gravity of what was happening hitting her.

No more Lisa. Her wife, her best friend. Disappearing around the corner, and disappearing from her life. There were no more second chances. For the first time in years, Jean Gunnhildr felt truly alone.

Years felt like centuries when bearing pain. It was just a regular stroll like any other. Going down a path trodden hundreds of times by the same feet, the same routes of vendors and storefronts, she saw it. Lisa saw it. 

On the windowsill, the one she would look out of longingly in their shared bedroom, wondering what time her now ex-wife would come home from the Headquarters, there was a pot warmed by the sun.

Those flowers.. Those purple fucking flowers. She had been keeping them. Watering them, replacing them, taking the delicate care required to raise them in such a colder climate than they were used to.

The dam broke. The emotions started to flood, like the tears now streaming from Lisa’s eyes.

All thoughts seemed to slow and come to a stop. There was only one thing, one thing she had to do. Taking the signature rose from her wide-brimmed hat, she tentatively knocked on that all too familiar door.

The blonde woman answered, groggy and looking like she hadn’t had a night’s sleep. Her expression quickly shifted from drowsy to something unnameable, as she examined the other woman in front of her, clasping gently a single Sumeru rose.

“Lisa…?”