Chapter Text
When Ajax is twelve years old, for reasons undisclosed to himself and his siblings (though apparent to anyone with a somewhat discerning eye), he and his family move from the freezing tundra that is their hometown in Snezhnaya, to the temperate climate of Qingce village, in Liyue. His parents, granted political refuge by the ruling bodies of Liyue, and blessed by their higher powers, are stationed in the village and given new names and identities, so that they may live peacefully as they raise their children, away from the ever-pervasive watch of Her Majesty the Tsaritsa, Queen of Snezhnaya and Governing General of the Zapolyarny Army.
However, Ajax, as mentioned before, is only twelve years old. Very little of the situation as earlier outlined would make any sense to him whatsoever, and were he to be told in no uncertain terms that his parents were considered to be enemies of the state in his home-country, there is little doubt that any and all such information would pass through one ear and exit out of the other. Ajax is a healthy young boy, with very little knowledge of state affairs—and like any other healthy young boy, Ajax is more interested in climbing trees and playing at being a battle-hardened warrior than he is in anything trivial like politics.
Now, it is important to note that although Ajax is not bothered by grown-up tantrums, or by conflicts of the state with its academics, he is intensely bothered by having to leave behind his home, and along with it, his reputation among the village children as the Young King of Morepesok, Harbinger of Chaos and General Rowdiness. When growing up in a place as small as his hometown, one learns early on that in order to not fall prey to older children looking to pick on weaklings, there is a certain façade of bravado that must be taken up, and with it, a mantle of troublemaking so must rest upon one’s shoulders. And in a climate as harsh and as cold as the ever-frozen ground, rivers and lakes he was raised on, there is no room for mercy. Growing up, as any child can tell you, is, in and of itself, warfare of the highest and most calculating degree; for Ajax, this is doubly true. Once at the top of the ladder, there is no rest from the constant barrage of attacks from below, and there is no use in being timid as you step on the fingers of those who clamour for your throne.
In fact, he is so intensely bothered by this loss of stature that he outright refused to leave, having to be physically carried away by his parents, who allowed him to kick and scream as hard and as loud as he wanted, until eventually he tired himself out, and fell asleep on his father’s shoulder. By the time he woke from his slumber, they were already fast on their way to Liyue, and Ajax sulked for the rest of the trip.
As the middle child of his large family (two older brothers, one older sister, and a younger sister, with another baby sibling on the way), Ajax often got away scot-free with his general antics, but as his parents carefully sat him down to explain, those days were over.
“Ajax,” his mother says to him, stern and forthright like always. “When we reach our new home, it will be a new start. For all of us. Including you.”
“Your mother is right.” His father nods sagely. “We are expecting you to be on your best behaviour, do you understand? Liyue is different to home—we must respect their cultural norms and adhere to the social rules expected of us, especially as we are newcomers. Which means no roughhousing with the other children. Ajax. Are you listening to me?”
“Uh-huh,” he says. Ajax is not listening. His mother sighs.
“If we cannot warn him then he will have to learn on his own,” she says, with an air of finality. “We can only hope that his poor behaviour will not reflect too badly onto us.”
Of course, nothing really turns out the way one hopes, but in the end, Ajax is just a little boy. Perhaps, his parents muse to themselves, a change of scenery would be good for him—provide him with some kind of cultural perspective. Many studies have been done on the positive effect a dual-cultural upbringing can have on a child, and if they can effectively integrate the family into the village community, then the experience will, at best, teach him valuable skills in socialisation that don’t involve tackling other people to the ground. At worst, he will simply remain the way he is, and really, his parents chuckle to each other, how bad could that possibly be?
“Hello, my name is Ajax! I am from Snezhnaya! This is my village now!”
These are the first sentences Ajax learns in Liyuen. His rage at being torn from his hard-won territory back home now long forgotten, he takes to the language like a fish to water, as many young children are able to in the way adults are not. His parents had smiled sheepishly at the teacher slash translator that had been assigned to them by the Qixing, apologies for their son’s unruly behaviour on their lips, but the woman had simply laughed. “Children with strong personalities grow into adults with conviction. If he learns everything else as quickly as he can pick up a foreign tongue, then the world is at his fingertips. Clever children have good prospects! Good luck, little Childe!*”
The child he had been addressing with this spiel looks up from what they had been doing and fixes him with a look of confusion. Their long hair brushes the ground, tangled with dirt and small branches, and they’re wearing a funky hat, which is why Ajax decided to talk to them in the first place. “What?” they ask. “Who are you?”
It takes Ajax a moment to figure out what they were asking him, after which he says, “I said! My name is Ajax!”
Standing up from where they had been crouching on the ground, the child squints at him suspiciously, before saying something very quickly that he can’t quite understand. Remembering what his teacher had told him, he dutifully recites, “Please speak slower. I am still learning.”
“I said, you are a foreigner,” the child replies. “What are you doing here, in our village?”
“My village now,” Ajax says again, stubbornly.
“No,” says the child, frowning. “This village belongs to the gods! Not to you, or anyone else.”
“Gods?” Ajax tries the word out on his tongue. “What’s that?”
“The ones who take care of us.”
“Parents?”
“A little bit, but mostly not. We offer things to them, and they protect our village. They bring good fortune and good food,” The child tilts their head at him. “Do you not have gods in Snezhnaya?”
“Maybe,” Ajax says vaguely. He has a recollection of leaving bowls of milk and honey on the doorstep, with rolls of good bread and butter that his father would make specially, all of which would be gone by the next morning. Once, he tried to stay awake and catch whoever was taking it, but he had fallen asleep by the door, and gotten an awful chill. He had, however, at some point in the night, been covered in a heavy blanket—by who, he wasn’t sure. His parents never mentioned it, and he had never asked, but as his mother fussed and scolded him the next morning for being out of his room at night, he could have sworn he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye. Of course, that could just have been the fever playing tricks on his mind. “I dunno. Do you wanna play?”
“Sure,” the kid acquiesces. They straighten their hat, yanking it down towards their ears, and bow clumsily at him. “My name is Hu Tao. Your name is hard to pronounce. Ai- ya? Ai-yack?”
“Ajax,” Ajax supplies, bowing back uncertainly. This seems to satisfy the child, who beams.
“Sure,” Hu Tao says. “That’s what I said, right?
“No.”
“Oh, I was so sure I got it right. Ai-ya-ke-si. Is that better?”
“Guess so. Hey, do you wanna play at fighting? I’m really good at fighting.”
“Not as good as me probably,” Hu Tao says, turning their nose up at him. “I have really sharp teeth, and baba gave me a knife for my birthday. I’m eleven.”
“Ha!” Ajax pumps his fist. “I’m twelve! That means I’m older than you!”
“Yeah, but do you have a knife?”
“…No.”
“Ha!”
The two quickly become fast friends, and by the time Ajax’s older sister comes to drag him home for dinner, he’s learned a lot about Hu Tao, and also about Qingce village. It turns out, much to Ajax’s confusion, that Hu Tao isn’t the amorphous androgynous being that Ajax had assumed them to be, but rather, a girl, the first daughter of Qingce village’s local funeral director. This is something he finds to be inconceivable, mainly due to the fact that nothing about her clothing or manner had signified any hints towards her being a girl at all, and in fact, he can hardly imagine Hu Tao, who rolls around in dirt and mud and prides herself on the fact that she has been wearing the same dress for the past seven days, in any kind of feminine role whatsoever. When he tells her this, she spits in his face and yells that her mama had told her that there is no proper way to be a lady. “Mama says that to be young is to be free to choose,” she says, with all the wisdom of an old woman, as Ajax furiously scrubs at his face to rid himself of whatever horrendous germs Hu Tao has managed to spray all over him. “And I choose to be disgusting!”
“Okay,” Ajax says, almost despairing at the choice of friend he has made. “Can we play now?”
He also learns, in the duration of the long, hot afternoon, sun blazing above his head and burning the back of his neck in the way Snezhnayan summers never had, that Qingce village has a long and unique history of godly intervention, whatever that means, and that here in the countryside, the annual rites and festivals are treated with far more reverence than they are in the capital of Liyue-gang. In fact it is so common for the gods to descend and bless the people, that Hu Tao swears on her life and the clothes on her back that she has met one of these gods herself.
“Baba says that to see a god is to be a chosen one,” Hu Tao says as she repeatedly hits Ajax’s head with a stick. He has long succumbed to the heat, lying belly-up in a shallow pond amid the lily-fields. “They don’t reveal themselves to just anyone, you know. I drew a picture of them, and I wrote a poem. I carry it everywhere.”
Ajax sits up, suddenly interested, as Hu Tao shoves a hand into her dress pocket and rummages around for a bit, before drawing out a tattered bit of parchment. “This is them. See?”
The drawing itself is nothing much to look at—just the childish scribbles of an eleven-year-old, paired with a string of characters that Ajax doesn’t know how to read, but what the drawing is of is what catches Ajax’s attention. “Is that a bird?”
“Don’t be stupid! This is the Cloud Retainer! She lives in Jueyun Karst, and hates people, but she likes Ganyu. That’s how I saw her—I spotted Ganyu talking to her in the forest!”
“Who’s Ganyu?”
“Just some kid. She’s soooooo boring. She’s not cool like me and my friends, she just spends all her time playing tea party with Guizhong! And she always wears this stupid hood. But because of her I got to see the Cloud Retainer, so I guess she’s okay.” Hu Tao shrugs and puts her drawing away. “Anyway, tomorrow my friends come back from the capital, so you can meet them! Xiao probably won’t like you at all—he doesn’t like people. And Zhongli is—well. Zhongli is Zhongli. He likes new things, though, so he’ll be really interested in you. If you tell him lots about Snezhnaya then he’ll be your friend for sure. He’s my best friend though—so you can’t have him all the time.”
“Okay,” Ajax says. He had understood about half of that, and flops back down into the puddle. “I’m tired.”
“Really? Why? It’s not even time for dinner!”
“It’s so hot,” Ajax groans, and Hu Tao laughs at him.
“If you think this is hot,” she says, tone wise and all-knowing again. “Then good luck surviving the next two months, ice-cream boy.”
“Ice-cream?” Ajax asks, bewildered. “Why ice-cream?”
Hutao laughs again. “Because you melt in the sun! Watch out, cannonball!”
Ajax cracks an eye open just in time to see Hutao hurtling towards the puddle, and he screams, trying to escape, but it’s too late. Hu Tao lands right on his sternum, and it’s a total miracle that Ajax doesn’t hurl everywhere. “Ow! Get off me!”
“No!”
“You’re so bony, you’re hurting me! Ow, ow, ow!”
“Suck it up, ice-cream boy!” She digs an elbow vindictively into his ribs, and he howls in pain. “Trust no one!”
Ajax returns home with an impressive array of bruises, a bite mark on his upper arm, and a new attitude towards the women in his life. Back in Morepesok, most of the girls had been kept at home with their mothers, while the boys were free to go out do as they pleased. Evidently, the same does not apply in Liyue, or at least, not to Hu Tao. When he informs his parents of the half-wild girl he had met among the lily-fields, they laugh good-naturedly. “Oh, the funeral director’s daughter?” His mother asks, cutting up the fish on Tonia’s plate as the little girl babbles in her highchair. “I’ve heard that she’s an unruly one! She’s a good match for you, Ajax—you two are probably like peas in a pod. Maybe you should ask her about school! You’ll be starting classes after the summer, too. It would be good to know what to expect, right?”
This makes no sense to Ajax. He and Hu Tao look nothing alike at all, and peas are meant to look alike! But as he gets ready for bed, his father tucking him under the covers and kissing his forehead, he realises two things. One, that if Hu Tao’s friends are anything at all like her, then maybe this new place won’t be as boring as he had thought it would be. And two, if Hu Tao has seen a god, then maybe he’ll get to meet a god too, and maybe they can give him a knife better than the one Hu Tao has, and teach him how to never grow up, and also how to get out of going to school.
His mind worn out with the excitement of the day, and apprehensive of all the things that may come tomorrow, he drifts into a deep, deep slumber, and dreams of home, and of new friends, and of a big, wide forest hiding something older than the earth itself.