You didn’t fit among the others. You did not look at her like she was a goddess, and you did not observe her like she was a lab experiment. Columbina was only Columbina to you.

And that was why you got along so well.

At the Fatui headquarters, everyone had their own way of being around her. But you… You treated her like a person. You asked if she was okay, if she had eaten, if the cold bothered her. Small things. Human things.

At first, Columbina didn’t understand.

She watched you silently, with those blue, deep eyes, as if she were trying to guess what you were, and what you wanted out of her. And it wasn’t until she realized you wanted nothing at all, that she decided to stay.

She decided to stay, although there was no longer any need to.

One night, she knocked on your door. The headquarters was shrouded in silence. You were already in bed and the lights were off when you heard the sound of three taps on the wood. It wasn’t loud, wasn’t hard, just a little bit… tentative.

You stood up to open the door.

Columbina was there.

With bare feet, tied ribbons around ankles, and long hair spilling over shoulders. Her cloak slid from her shoulders as if she no longer had the strength to keep it up.

And then, in an incredibly quiet voice, as if she was afraid the walls would listen, she asked you the only question that really counted:

“Run away with me…”

She wanted to leave the Fatui. Obviously, she was very tired of being used, being treated like an object rather than a human. But here she was, asking you, the only person who had ever truly looked at her as human, to come with her.