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He was on the brink of going mad. Purely, wholly, mad.
Childe, who had watched Signora slip out of the scene gracefully, took it upon himself to leave shortly after. There was no need to dote on or listen to a conversation he had no want to hear.
His boots drag up the stairs of the bank, rounding corners upon corners till he’s met with the (mostly devoid of life) room in front of him. It was his temporary apartment, so to speak, while he was in Liyue.
Well. Was.
Childe finds his head strum with thoughts, no longer swimming through his head like calm fish, but roaring tides searing his mental energy through the storming errors of their ways.
His head hurts, the throb that turned from dull to searing now pulsing at the forefront of his mind. He rips his gloves off in a last fit of anger, slapping them onto the desk that’s lied (mostly) untouched in the half year he was here. His fingers quell the rising heat of anger that brings his head into this state, massaging a circle into his temples and shutting his eyes.
Lucky, he had to remind himself. He was lucky to be the youngest Fatui Harbinger.
Still, it did him no wonders in the eyes of. Well, everyone.
Tossed to the side, left as a pawn in a game. These words sting through the nicks of his brain, digging themselves tightly into the part of him that cared, that once found solace in this… this harbour.
Even though he was the one who nearly brought it down.
“She had done well to keep the prying ears of her colleague, Childe, away.” Not even a thank you. Not even a “oh yeah. Sorry for keeping you in the dark and lying to you, by the way.”
He thinks it’s fair, he thinks it’s what he deserves.
Still, the back of his brain screams and writhes in agony at the deception, of the borderline betrayal that threatens to sear the corner of his vision clean of his charming facade, one that had been worn and eventually torn from his face in the months he stayed in the warming climate.
His headache pounds again, and he briefly thinks this is the moment when the average person cries. When the person they looked forwards to seeing had just ripped their world from under their feet. When they didn’t even spare him a single glance more, after a whole half year of acting like best friends.
Not even a sorry. Not even a thank you.
Childe, for all the little amount of respect he’s apparently worth, drops. His knees feel as weak as his ability to take in a situation and rake it back to the back of his mind, and when he drops with his back against the door he can’t find the tears he’s supposed to have.
There’s not a single drop left on his skin, and for someone who’s a hydro element (in tune with the waters around him) he finds himself unable.
There was nothing but the hollow shell of the Fatui Harbinger, and his debt weighing upon him.
Shame.
He still has some remaining paperwork to finish, including a salt-in-wound esque report about the details of his operations in Liyue to the Tsaritsa. He leaves out Zhongli entirely, leaving out the way he used to fight to make the other man smile or the way he grinned when he was the only one able to pull him back again and again.
Their friendship— if it could even be called that— again plucked from his worries.
It was nothing but rubble.
Smiles that he should’ve seen faked, eyes that shined like the very gold that graced this earth. Some people used to describe them as Cor Lapis. Childe, who had no interest in Cor Lapis, preferred molten gold. It made sense, how they’d make a whole room melt. Worth more than eons of Mora and thousands of pages of Intellect.
There was a spark, or so Childe had believed. He was fluent in adaptability, changing sides like snapping his fingers. His emotions just the same.
Still, like the very water he manipulates, he was see-through. As clear as glass, cool as day. His feelings dragged through the mud and then stomped on with the heel of a boot he once began to call his ‘friend.’
He runs a shaking hand through his hair, steadying himself as he finishes the report and wordlessly hands it off to Ekaterina.
After the Teucer situation earlier, he felt more drained than he had in his life. Foul Legacy transformation, the effort of hiding his raging emotions beneath the surface of his skin. He was sure it flashed through his eyes, so he tried. He tried, with all his might, to forget.
Now the moon is high, and when Childe used to take moonlit walks and revel in the simplicity of everything when it was black and blue, he finds he can no longer find the strength to leave his room.
His emotions are tight-lipped. And for once, in a very long time, he is alone once more.
He knows his gaze is lingering on the edge of the Harbour when the boat leaves, he knows he’s watching the events of 2 years play behind his eyes in the span of seconds. Every interaction, every simple laugh shared. How much of it was a lie? A ruse?
Some part of him doesn’t want to know the answer, so he casts his gaze away from the Harbour. No longer seeking a man that never bothered to say goodbye. That he expected to wave to him as he left, not even there.
It seems, to him at least, that the God of Contracts was nothing more than an ardent liar.
Arriving back in Snezhnaya is a slap in the face in all senses of the phrase. When the boat docks once more and Childe has analysed the same 40 interactions in his head enough times to consider slapping himself back to reality, he finds stepping onto the familiar cool Snezhnayan climate is warm.
Irony aside, the emotion that can only be described as familiarity warms his cooling insides and quells his fears for just the briefest second in time.
The snow crunches beneath his heel, and he ducks a simple bow of his head in thanks to the ferry lady, though he didn’t need to.
Liyue is far past him, as it has been for days. He hopes, with some sense of the word, he can put it beside him as well.
There’s still that headache. That pulsing pain in his head when he arrives to the Zapolyarny Palace. Though the frost covered kingdom is but a mere relic in his head by the time he sees it again, it still hails his memories back to before this whole diplomatic trip.
Childe should’ve known better than to pretend to be a diplomat, anyways.
The palace hails both good and bad memories from him, of his first times as a new recruit inside these walls (good). Or of that time he was about three milimetres from strangling the Dottore himself (bad).
Still, it is a pleasant sight on his tired eyes, and hearing the echo of his boots against the hallway remains the pleasant music to his ears that he needs. Perhaps it’ll soothe the raging tides of his thoughts, push the pulsing back down in his head.
At the end of the empty hallway is a throne. The Tsaritsa stands in wait, with Signora safely by her side.
The 8th of the 11, granted a Cryo Delusion by the Tsaritsa herself.
Childe, when he drops to one knee to bow low, has to reserve himself from scoffing. Otherwise, he might dig up the memories he is trying oh so hard to bury.
He still cannot bring himself to take his once-daily midnight walk anymore. He can only find it in himself to stare out at the moon from his bed, and wonder where it is that he went wrong.
His anger has long died. It was left to wither on the docks of Liyue Harbour, built by the man who had made that anger spring to life to begin with.
Now he’s tired. And it goes without saying that Childe wants to sleep, tucking his head onto his pillow and falling into a blank world of pleasant dreams was the purest idea he could imagine.
But he had to think about the future. Had to think about when he’d dream he’d see Cor Lapis and the sun and molten gold. Had to think about whenever it is that he woke up— he hoped it was never— that he’d have to deal with the sinking reality that he is alone once more. That his heart is not deserving of more than a side glance, and he is but a mere weapon in battle to be used and worn.
He had believed that Zhongli’s warm side glances meant something, only to revel in the fact that he had brought his own mask down and gotten hurt. At some point, he had stopped being Childe and became Ajax for the first time in ten years. For the first time since he crawled out of the Abyss, for the first time since his 14th birthday.
And he was reminded of Pulcinella’s words: “Do not let them see you for what you are. Do not let them know you as Ajax. It will only bring you harm in a harmful world.”
He hated with the remnants of his energy that any of the other 11s words had merit. That they had any value at all in this world compared to him.
Being awake had its downsides too. He could freely roam the scene in the Bank. He could remember Signora clicking Morax and his stomach dropping because no, no no no this was Zhongli not Morax , and Morax had not spared him a glance the whole time. He had met his eyes not once, and he had ignored him the entire time. He had pulled the rug from his feet then allowed Childe to simmer in the ashes alone, like the pawn he was.
Still, he would not allow his mind to entertain fantasies of what it was he could’ve been allowed. If he had known, if he had been allowed to build his guard, would he have fallen all the same?
Or would he have been spared the fall from grace?
Childe always allowed his mind to entertain it’s darkest desires in the private of his thoughts, for nobody could read them and he was safe.
But certain things were not allowed into that safe space, and Zhongli— Morax —’s face was becoming one of them.
His headache rages, but he stays awake. For what meets him in his dreams is hope, and Childe has learned the hard way once more that hope is not a thing he is allowed. Maybe in another life he was allowed, but not this one.
Hu Tao making her own business is a joke that the traveler— Aether, he corrects himself— and Paimon used to make. Sometimes, even Childe would be found chuckling along. Still, today she has kept to herself in the parlor.
Zhongli’s breaths are steady and calculated, an old technique he developed long ago to keep the fear from his veins when facing an opponent that could just as easily smash him if he was not careful.
Inhale, slow your breaths and calm your heart.
It always worked.
Today it didn’t.
His heart still beats loudly in his ears, and the red outline of his eyes still shines with glimmers of dried tears stuck to his face. He’s been sitting there for so long, staring at his desk with his pictures in frames turned downwards. Their hollow presence only moves to rip the hole in his chest further, and not even Hu Tao has disturbed him yet.
Normally she’d have bugged him at least once. Funeral this, funeral that, she was always running around the parlor and Zhongli normally had something to do.
He doesn’t know if he’s physically or emotionally radiating a wave of ‘please don’t talk to me,’ but it was working, and he was waiting patiently for someone— anyone — to disturb him from his thoughts.
He wants to stop thinking, he wants his mind to ease back for just a second. It still sears through his mind, it still burns him gradually.
("Why, Xiansheng, I didn’t know you had it in you to pay,” Childe had laughed, and oh how dearly he wished he could tell him that he treasured that laugh.
Zhongli had smiled faintly, tracing every line of his face with his eyes, dragging his gaze across his hair, his laugh, his face, his smile — oh how he would miss this. It was, with sinking pain, that he realised how badly he’d miss this.
Still he smiled and drunk in the familiarity that he was allowed to have, a final time, before Childe would bring havoc to the nation once more.
When the time came for him to get up and look at Childe once more, he found his stomach twist and knot. He found the better part of himself withering and yelling that this was inhumane, but he was anything but human, so how was he able to be humane?
His gut tightened, and he saw Childe’s eyes flicker with the realisation of what he’d do tomorrow. He watched the man slowly fight a frown, smiling at him in knowing that Rex Lapis would come if anything bad were to happen. That it’d be okay in the end
But Zhongli knew that this was it. After this, he’d go back to Snezhnaya.
Some part of him yearned. Some part of him didn’t want to let go of his smile and his laugh, and the never ending torment that plagued him. For it was his duty as a God, and as an Archon, to shoulder the burden others could not carry.
“I’ll see you in the morning, Childe,” he had said, and Childe had beamed in the way that made his heart flip foolishly.
It was a burden he wasn’t sure he could carry, either.
“See you in the morning, Zhongli,” and when his name left his mouth he knew it was too late to turn back. So he stood in front of the corner store, watching the figure of a man that had long retreated and waiting for his heart to stop strumming ugly notes in his chest until the lady closed the store and ushered him out.
He’d refused to meet Childe’s eyes the whole time, for he knew they were broken in the realisation that he’d been used. And he never addressed him, too afraid of his voice breaking worse than Childe’s own was.
And he nearly made it to the end, before he caught the glint of his fleeting gaze on him as he departed, and he saw just how badly he’d hurt him. He saw how many spears he had driven through his heart, and he regretted so much in that split second. More than he’d be able to put into words. More than any mortal should ever comprehend.
He lost a fight against the sea, after just having won it.
Hu Tao had watched him return to the parlor the next morning, about to give him paperwork to do before seeing the pained expression not even a God could hide and retreated. Leaving the man to himself.
So when he sat on the roof of a house, far hidden into the shadows, he had waved to him as he left in the dusk of night. He could not bring himself to break his promise — his contract. And he wished he could’ve been there to send him off properly. And he wished the tears on his face were fake, watching him leave for the last time.
It hurt more than he had planned, a contract to end all contracts. And no amount of pretending could keep the earth from hearing his silent sobs. And as the ground split open, it listened to his tears. It listened to a myriad of broken promises and “i’m sorry,”s. Two words he had not said in a long, long time.)
Adepti did not need sleep. Still, without a gnosis for the first time in 2 millenia, Zhongli felt and looked worse for wear.
After sitting and staring and drunk off his own thoughts and memories for days on end, it was Aether and Paimon that finally broke his cloud of haze.
He wasn’t sure why they had come seeking out the remnants of an ex-Archon such as himself, but he welcomed the distraction so long as it drew his mind out of itself. Even for a little while.
Still, Aether’s unexpected entrance into his office was exactly as said: unexpected.
“Hey, Zhongli, can I ask you a few— oh, sorry,” Aether had started, opening the door and glancing Zhongli once over. “—We can come back later if-”
“There’s no need,” Zhongli said, softly, his voice raw from not speaking in at least a week. “Sit, what is it you need?”
“We can always come back, really, it’s no big deal—”
“Please, entertain me for once,” he had pleaded, maybe for the first time in however many years, and gestured to his seat. “I am free today.” As he has been for the last week, and however long he requires to mope more in the future.
Aether bit his lip nervously, turned to Paimon, and took a tentative seat.
“Well, we came to ask about Inazuma, but—” He cut himself off, gesturing for Paimon to finish.
The usually not-so-reserved faerie seemed tense, unusually quiet, so Aether picked his sentence up again, “—if there’s something else going on, we’re always here to-”
Zhongli waved his hand as a sign of dismissal, hoping his distraction would not bring bad memories. Only a week, and the memories he had turned sour and bittersweet, of a hope and life he still, to this day, was not allowed to have.
He had been too selfish, his whole life, and only now did he see through it all.
“I am fine, but I appreciate the concern.”
“You’re clearly not,” Aether continued, who was never afraid to call bullshit on the divine, for he himself seemed to know more than he lets on about what Zhongli’s facing. Whatever that may be. “I talked to Hu Tao,”
Zhongli sucks in a breath, none too subtly.
“Yeah. She told me she hasn’t seen you leave the office for days. Only to make tea once, yesterday, which is what this is I’m guessing.” He gestured to the untouched teapot, cold and bad by this point.
Zhongli nods, tentatively, and drops his gaze uncharacteristically. “She is correct.”
“So?”
“So?” Zhongli echoes.
“What’s up?”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I don’t believe it will be of any interest to you,”
“Zhongli,” he sighs, exasperatedly. “We’re friends, right?”
To a degree, yes, they were friends. Maybe not as close friends as he was with others in the past, or as close as ever with C—
He pauses his train of thought when he realises he’s said nothing yet. “Yes.”
“Then what’s up?”
“...Childe??” Paimon echoes, confused. “You’re sad because that vegetable haired dingus left?”
Zhongli didn’t ask to be ridiculed by a talking faerie that looked no older than 7 years old. Still, he finds himself softly saying, “Yes.” Though he wishes he wasn’t.
“I mean,” Paimon chimes, “That clown wig-having stupidhead doesn’t deserve your attention anyways. He’s just a big bad meanie!”
Aether hisses something to Paimon about insulting Childe in front of him, but Zhongli’s smiling for the first time in days at the creative insults, the tug of his lip upwards bringing him some shelter in the dreary days that have followed and will follow him.
“What?? Paimon’s right! He’s just a dumb carrot salad!”
Even Aether has to hold his snort at that, from the sheer childish way she put it. Zhongli, though he wants less and less to be reminded of Childe, finds the insults funny, and revels in the moments his body allows him to smile again.
The guilt he feels is subjective. His tears, however, are objective.
(It’s been days (—weeks?) since he’s last been able to eat at the Wanmin restaurant. (He tried, once, but turned like a coward halfway through his walk there.) Since he’s taken a moonlit walk (by himself, alone, alone. ) or visited the bank. (He still has a tab he reckons he needs to pay off.)
Childe always liked to say “ Everything is simpler in black and blue, ” referring to the dusk drowned city which was a mixture of soft yellow light and deep blue skies and dark shadows casting their faces. And he was right, Liyue looked more of that of a distant world under the moonlight.
It was beautiful, but cold. Unknown, yet comforting. He could see the thrill Childe had found in it.
He cannot bring himself to take one.)
It’s a little past 2 in the morning when Childe slips out of the comfort of his own home into the cold Snezhnayan air. The cold drags its supple fingers alongside the fragile warmth of his skin, leaving goosebumps and a shiver in its wake.
Childe drags a long, sustaining breath through his lips and cards a steadying hand through his hair. Willing his heart to settle, the gentle tug of freedom that pulls at him settles for just a second. He pushes his back into the frame of the door and let an exhausting sigh drag past the brink of his composure.
The threads of hair on Childe’s arms stick up in the cool breezes that lazes past him, lapping like a dog for air to calm against his thundering heart. The one screaming at his lungs, his chest, singing a hole where it presides.
His foot creaks against the floorboards of the porch, dragging himself into the snow which crunches under his boot.
He wraps his coat further around his arms, breathing in the mint of the air and willing it to cool his lungs. There’s something enthralling about watching the night change the landscape around him, walking into unknown danger and seeing the roads he's glazed over a million times in a new light. (Or lack thereof.)
And for once, his thoughts are calmed. The moonlight embraces him as gently as a mother embraces her child and he’s careful. Careful in the sense to watch his feet for cracks in the ground, but not careful enough to push past his dangerous surroundings.
There was nothing that scared him anymore, only the things that thrilled him, and the things that didn’t.
That’s what he’s always told himself, until that moment at the bank. It was the first time he had truly felt as terrified as his 14 year old self who still went by Ajax. It was the first moment in nearly a dozen years that he had felt the sinking guilt, the clawing fear, wrapping its hands around his throat and squeezing the air out of him till he couldn't breathe any longer.
He breathes his worries out in a breath, and there's no indication that it’s left his lips besides the frost that curls upwards like white-tinted smoke. Remnants of a cold fire long extinguished.
His eyes still feel heavy, his sleep schedule is still terrible after a month back home. (What was he supposed to do? Succumb to dreams? Wake up crying again? No. He was a Harbinger. He couldn’t— he wouldn’t — succumb to his heart.) And he allows, for the first time in a while, to willingly let sleep drag him into its false sense of hope as he slips down the bark of a tree and rests his head against his own shoulders, cold air biting him the way it always did when he was younger and took these walks every night.
And he’s not asleep for a moment before his eyelashes flutter open again, his eyes adjusting to the scenery as if he had been asleep for hours. It takes his tired eyes a moment to adjust, in which warm air breeches his lungs unexpectedly but all too familiarly and— oh. Oh no.
His eyes dart open clearly now as the scenery around him adjusts and he’s back in Liyue, sitting in the dirt and the moon is slowly setting as pink colours the edge of the horizon.
Why why why — why is he back in Liyue nononono —
“Childe,” a voice rumbles from near him and god would he be lying if he said he didn’t melt and freeze at the same time. His back stiffens, his shoulders slump, and the two parts of his mind that are always at war fight for control of his conscious decisions.
Why is Zhongli here?
It had to be a dream— Childe tries to reason. But he knows he should be back under the roof of a tree’s shelter back in Snezhnaya and the warm, freshly watered soil is textured and feels too real under his fingertips.
He panics, and does the only thing he knows how to do,
“Zhongli?”
He’s underdressed— only wearing sweatpants, a hoodie, and a poor excuse of a jacket. (He’s worn the same one since he was 16, and he hasn’t grown an inch since that time. It reeks, but it bleeds in a shade of his memories and he can’t really let it go.)
“Why am I in Liyue?” He asks, though feels profoundly dumb, as if he should know the answer.
“I—” Zhongli starts, moving into his view, and he can see him hesitate, mull something over. There’s regret in his irises. “—I used an adepti art.”
Childe is silent for all too long as he gets up, brushing dirt off his pants. “...What?”
“I—” And he reconsiders, fumbling over his words in a way Childe has never seen him do before. (well, there was that one time with the chopsticks but could that even count? They had no significance.) “I used an adept art called Dream Trawler.”
“You.” Childe stutters, fumbling on his own words. “You used an adepti art to what—? Infiltrate my dreams?”
“No.” Zhongli says, gazing almost with a lost glint in his eyes at the half corporeal version of Childe standing next to him. “I used an adepti art to summon you here.”
Childe finds his once dulled headache flaring up again, staring down those— those fucking eyes. Molten gold, he had once called them. At some point, he almost even cheesily referred to them as the sun.
They look hollow now. As if there is nothing left in him but the remnants of what he pretended to be.
Childe tries with all his might to use this as an advantage. To help himself see that this is what the man really looks like under layers of facade. Capitalise off of his own misfortunes.
It doesn’t help that he can still hear his laugh ringing in his ears, though it's been weeks since he’s seen his face or touched his skin.
His heart screams. Childe stays silent.
“I hope that it’s a Lawachurl that wakes me up.”
Zhongli’s face turns downward. “Childe—”
“No, Zhongli,” He laughs, cruel and bitterly, “It’s not Childe, it’s Tartaglia. I am nothing more than a Fatui Agent in your eyes, so it’s probably best you addressed me as such.”
“I did not herald you here to be lectured about—”
“What? About your blatant lies? About your deception?”
Zhongli goes silent. Childe uses this as an opportunity, despite the strum of his wailing heart. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“I summoned you here to apologise, ” Zhongli cuts in finally, and his face is exasperated and smooth and it looks worn, the more Childe dares to look him in the eyes. Like the fragile shell of a man who has not slept in days. Who is too afraid to visit the corner store he’d always go to, who’s too afraid to take moonlit walks anymore. Zhongli has never looked worse for wear, as if there’s a very part of him that’s gone besides the Gnosis.
Childe hopes it stays like that, out of bitter tone and resentment towards him and himself. “You’re about a year too late.”
“Childe—”
“Let me go, Morax ,” He hisses, taking a step backwards, daring to move and feeling the connection of the summoning ground slowly wear away from him. “I don’t want to see you. I never want to see you again.”
“Childe, —” he repeats, once more being cut off.
“Let me go.” He commands, and his face is stern past the brink of pain he faces. Seeing the man’s face crack under his exterior. Swallow the lump of guilt he harbours. “You told me once that you didn’t like seeing me in pain. Or was that a lie too?”
Zhongli is silent. Then, softer than the man has ever spoken, he allows his voice to reach past his facade. “You may go,” and Childe doesn’t miss the crack in his voice, the way his vocal cords cannot handle the strain of not getting what he wants for once. That he’s well and truly lost.
And Childe knows he’s done it, he’s finally broken the man, and believes with his whole heart that it’s what he deserves after making him believe for a second he was worth anything at all. Feelings like those were dangerous, and sometimes Signora’s words had some merit to them.
“Goodbye.” He says, and can’t even bring himself to say his name.
And when his eyes flutter open, and the cold bristles his skin as he’s reminded he’s back in Snezhnaya, he can’t help the tears that soak his face. He can’t control the wails he lets out, and he most of all can’t control his darkest temptations that wish, with all his might, that Zhongli truly loved him.
But Childe is an unlucky man, and he never got what he wanted, but rather what he deserved. Love was never something he was allowed. Not in this lifetime, or the next.
The breath Zhongli massages out of his lungs is rough and warm, disgustingly warm, and he’s half sure it’s fatal, too. His body drags for air, but it’s constricted in on itself and he finds that it’s hard to breathe. It’s so hard to breathe and he feels every beat of his slow moving heart drag life back into him.
It’s been a very long time since he’s cried. Hundreds or thousands of years— they’re all the same. He remembers clutching the earth in his palms when Guizhong died. He remembers burying his face in his dirtied palms and letting his tears cleanse him of his sins as her form lay lifeless once more.
It feels the same. It feels exactly the same as before, and Zhongli is no more prepared for it.
As a sign of stability, as the very definition of stone, it was not in his interest to cry. It was not in his interest to let emotions plague him. It was always in his thoughts that emotions would only wear him down. After all, he was an Archon, and for 3,700 years he protected the land with such ideals.
Now he sat, ever as pathetically in the torn up earth, feeling tears soak and run his face clean of his ideals and morals because for once he had a chance to get what he wanted and missed it. It was the loss of something he hadn’t felt since the Archon war. He saw those eyes, he saw the ocean that flowed past them, and he failed to grab the sea.
And in the process, he had hurt him and then himself. This was, by no means, part of any contracts he had made. It was certainly violating a few he could think of. One with Guizhong in her parting breaths, begging him to keep living and with hope that he’d never face this sorrow again. Three with himself, about emotions. About getting entangled with Mortals. About the very emotion Love itself.
He had failed. He had failed so miserably that there was nothing left of him to gather the pieces of himself again.
He was no longer the God people sought after, but the ruins of a man that had lost and lost and lost until his pillars came down and his ashes came crashing to the ground. Left nothing but the scraps of his fragile sanity.
He was no longer an Archon, but a helpless man who had ruined everything.
Childe has a knack for being hapless. It stemmed, initially, as a joke he had with the other village boys when he was younger. When he’d lose luck of the draws or draw the short ends of sticks, how he was unlucky.
The sentiment was lost when he emerged from that pit of hell after 3 months— he was lucky to be strong. He was lucky to be working under the Tsaritsa. He was lucky.
Childe never felt lucky.
Teucer waves at him as he walks towards the front doors of the school building, blinding smile only a child could yet harbour. Childe tries, with everything in him, to match it, but it’s not the same. There isn’t a shine there that is supposed to be there. There’s a hidden truth behind his eyes that lack a passive innocence.
He drops his hand as Teucer turns back to the school building, disappears into the rugged building Childe swore he’d one day pay people to repair. In his small town of Morepesok, where everyone knew him.
He’s left with his thoughts for a timid second, pushing a sigh like iron out of his lungs and dragging a shaking hand down his face. There are dried tear tracks on his cheeks, but you’d never know unless you touched them. If there was one gift Childe harboured, it was the easy change of expression. The ability to never look the emotions he was feeling unless he wanted to.
The mere idea of yesterday's dilemma, waking up in Liyue, it leaves him stone cold, wanting. It leaves him backtracking his decisions. It makes him feel so weak, to want to run back to another man’s arms.
No, he shakes his head. He’s stronger than this. He’s been personally recognised by the Tsaritsa as one of the strongest, he has a Delusion , for Archons sake.
The snow crunches beneath his feet as he turns to leave, not wanting to be seen moping as he was. He drifts his hand to the side of his neck where an itch blooms and runs it over with his bare hands, the horizontal scar that peeks under his hair and drags onto his neck. He shivers.
Another pair of footsteps mimic his, and maybe its out of instinct, but Childe places a name to them instantly. Their drag across the ground in no hurry, the lingering pause they do once or twice. They’re not heavy, but they carry a man languidly. As if he’s seen a million more years Childe could ever dream of.
He shakes his head. “Zhongli,” He whispers, quietly, then turns to the footsteps and finds there’s nobody there. That there are no footsteps.
His thoughts gear slowly for a moment, turning behind his irises and feeling a pulse in his wrist drag cooly up to his ears. Then the footsteps resound again, dragging around a cart by the side of the forest ruined road.
He laughs briefly, nervously, and feels his heart string in his chest. Was he hallucinating? Or was this another adepti art?
He follows the sound of the footsteps against his better will, and as a fighter, a skilled warrior, he knows he shouldn’t. He knows he should not leap into possible danger head first but he is nothing but a fool who got entangled with the gods.
He rounds a tree, then two, then slips into the edge of the heart of the forest. A small circular clearing free of snow, of trees, of everything depressing and grey about Snezhnaya and instead looks like Fontaine-- or like Liyue.
The thought strikes him confused for a moment, never putting that idea to another, but it renders him useless regardless. When he moves his vision from the tree in front of him, he swears he sees a flash of gold, a tipping point. Gentle footprints outlined in the grass but not in the snow, and a long deserted teacup.
Childe’s fingers quiver over his neck as he rubs at the base of it, tugging at his collar and feeling his breathing latch onto a nail in his throat.
He is but a fool.
Time has no merit against impatience, Childe learns quickly, and imagines Teucer in his very spot. Perhaps not so curled up as he is— perhaps more comfortable with more leg room. The waters rock against him, the wind shivers in delight.
Childe shivers, but less of delight and more of a biting cold that slowly leaves his maimed body.
Perhaps a simple maroon button up and simple pants weren’t the best choice of long journey clothings— but who is Childe in terms of fashion? He doesn’t hail from Fontaine, and Signora regularly sneers at his choice of clothing.
His allegiance stills, it drops, and it waivers over hours and hours of a journey. When Childe opens his eyes again, lucid in his desires, he finds himself passing a bridge he hadn’t crossed in many ages.
The boat creaks, and Childe sighs with it, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt as the ravine they pass through in Fontaine travels back into the sea towards Sumeru. Where the lush jungles would greet him and afterwards where Liyue would rock into sight.
He is a fool. He is an indecisive, lovestruck, clumsy, half witted fool.
Liyue is lovelier in the dark, Childe had always remarked. He kept it to himself, for the most part, especially not around the man who seemed to channel the energy of Liyue through ever force of his being. Through every swipe of his hands or the slip of his eyes. The emotions that managed to break past a rocky facade— Childe really should’ve seen it coming
“Foresight was always your weakness, Tartaglia.”
Then he’d grown more comfortable, he’d seen the way Liyue moves, he’d seen the differences in people and he’d almost grown to fondly entertain the idea of staying after his mission. But Childe— Ajax, Tartaglia— he was never meant to stay in one place.
Still, the idea pulled at him for weeks until the notion of awakening a god devoured his sleep and his mind. Thoughts hungry for destruction, but heart screaming in fear.
Rex Lapis would protect his city, he was assured, and always did he find a way to sleep.
His heart strings an ugly note in his chest when the harbour comes into view, and dismantling the boat with hardly a glance at any of the members who had worked to get him there sings his impatience longer than time could ever pull him apart thread by thread.
A sentence sits on the back of his tongue, and though the person he thinks of is not there, he still so desperately wants to say it.
Placing his foot on the wood of the dock feels less a shock it should’ve— 3 months gone from the city and it feels like he hasn;t been here in 6 years and yet 6 seconds.
Childe finds his raging emotions nursed by the thought of an earlier headache, only medically dragging his heart into the loop of his thoughts.
He knows, by instinct, where to look first. He knows, by instinct, that he should look in the area where all broken people go. To look out at the sea and hope for something or someone.
He remembers Aether once talking about a girl who sat and waited for months for her lover by that port— Sisi? Was her name.
His footsteps carry him through the harbour, and rounding corners and slipping down sides of the docks feels almost as if he’d done this a million times before.
His stomach churns, and there is no Sisi waiting by the place connecting the two ports of Liyue.
If Zhongli recognises his footsteps, he does not move, he does not breathe differently, he definitely does not scrunch his eyebrows in protest— he definitely does not fight what he knows wouldn’t ever happen.
Childe stands in the dimly lit port as the moon casts a softer glow on the man's face, watching his details as he leans forwards onto the railing and watches the sea as if he’s missed the chance to grab it. To keep it.
Childe takes another step forwards, and when he opens his mouth to say anything— perhaps the planned speech he’d rehearsed in his head in the few days trip here— he finds nothing comes. He finds he is speechless, for the first time since the bank.
Zhongli knows he’s there. He knows that he is smarter than to mistake him for a stranger (though, sometimes Childe wonders if it would’ve been better if they remained so) and does not miss the minute flick of his eyes downwards. As he watches the sea lap at the rocks where the two vastly different worlds meet.
Childe slips closer into the shadows of the harbours connecting port, then finds his arms around the man’s middle and his chin on his shoulder.
It is only with this motion does he realise— well and truly— that Zhongli’s shoulders are shaking. That his breathing is just a millisecond too quick, that his eyes are not emotionless, but they are brimming with too many emotions to handle at once. Childe holds still, burying his face into his neck and quietly revelling in a scent and an emotion he locked away.
He’s been hurt— he’s been hurt for so long but he can’t find it in the ache of his bones to care, when all he wants to do is live in this moment right now.
Zhongli’s sigh comes out of him shakily, pulled from the back of his throat like he’s been hit with a tidal wave and is only now re learning how to breathe.
“I missed you,” Childe whispers into his neck, and knows Zhongli more or less doesn’t hear so much as feel it.
“I…” He struggles with words, for a man over 6,000 years old he has a hard time finding what words used to flow so easily to him. “...Missed you too.”
It’s the most bare way he can put it, but it’ll have to do for now. He doesn’t have time to write flowery prose, explain how deeply he had sunk into the earth some days and felt, beyond anything, the urge to sit and watch the ocean for days on end. Knowing he was the one that pushed it away in the first place.
His breathing is sour, as if he can’t believe the things he’s hearing, as if he still doesn’t trust himself to move, afraid he’s just dreaming.
His blood feels like ice in his body, only melting when Childe’s breathing fans his skin.
The only sound that echoes are the peoples voices, and still nobody moves to disturb the ongoing scene. Nobody even flicks their eyes towards them. As if this was just another day in Liyue harbour.
Oh how they’d like to know.
When Childe’s hands move away, Zhongli can only describe the feeling that floods his body as fear. Fear that he hadn’t yet had the time in the world to understand. Not the same as the fear of the Archon war— those times were fearful. He had never been more scared in his life— but he taught himself how to calm his emotions and embrace the very element he wielded.
Then his hands (bare, warm) drag to his back as he shifts to face his side. The ex-archon is still frozen, still afraid.
“Zhongli, look at me,” he utters, softly, as if it was difficult.
He casts his gaze upwards and meets his eyes, finding that he looked much better dressed down.
HIs heart is a traitor of the highest degree.
“Ajax,” he whispers, fond from a memory he’d turned in his mind over and over until it bled into his hands like his heart buried in the soil.
Childe— Ajax’s eye’s fondly cast over his face, once, twice. Memorising every line, every curve. Then, settling easy onto his eyes, leans so just a hair's breadth separates them.
Zhongli meets him, so the distance is lost like it should’ve been a long time ago.
And— despite the wind— he feels warm. He feels like a fool in love, he feels the pulsing of his heart ring in his ears when Childe slowly parts his lips for air then leans back in with his hands on his face and kissing him as if they’re the last people alive.
Zhongli finds it easy to return— vigour slumping into his willing push as nothing but warmth dots his vision. Eyes closed, desperately grasping at the person making his heart shudder in his chest.
Nothing but longing for more drives his actions, and sometimes as a god he forgets that mortals need to breathe more and longer than gods do, finding a bit of cause for concern when Ajax pushes back, gasping and heaving for air.
“ Gods, ” he whispers, laughing with no breath stuck to the roof of his throat. “If I knew.”
Zhongli leans his back against the railing with Ajax but inches in front of him (when did that happen?). “Childe—”
“I love you,” Childe cuts in, grabbing the sides of his face and burying his face into his neck. “ Archons above I love you,”
Zhongli’s heart shudders for the nth time that day in his chest, and he drags a languid breath out of his constricting lungs as he drags a hand from the nape of Childe’s hair up his scalp. “I’m sorry,” He hoarses, “For lying. I didn’t mean at first to hurt— and then it was too late to go back.”
Childe says nothing, but slumps forwards into Zhongli, wrapping his arms around his wrist and letting his blood wash around him. They say that warmth is love and cold is heartbreak— but he finds nothing but irony in the way his body feels like a calming, barely cool tide that washes over him. Wanting, hungering. Perhaps it's his nature. Perhaps heartbreak makes him disgustingly warm and love provides him with the fuel he needs to keep running.
“I love you.” Zhongli whispers, burying his face into the other man's hair.
Childe hums and relaxes his shoulder, knowing that his muscles are taut with tension and pain. “It’s ok,” He responds, mostly in turn to Zhongli’s earlier apology. “I’ve forgiven you a long time ago.” And his heart did, nearly the second he arrived in Snezhnaya.
“That’s good,” Zhongli hums. “I wouldn’t want my husband to be mad at me eternally.”
Childe’s thoughts grind to a halt, picking his cheek away from his chest and looking up to stare at Zhongli’s eyes. “Hold on. Husband?”
Zhongli sputters over his words for probably the first time in a millenia, “Yes, well, I— I regrettably admit there is one more piece of information I have been withholding from you.”
Childe blinks owlishly once, then twice. “Which…. Is…?”
“Those…” He pauses, feeling a rush of heat bloom on the high rise of his cheeks, “Those chopsticks I bought— well, you bought for yourself on my behalf— are… Well. For lack of a better term, marriage chopsticks.”
“They’re….” Childe trails off, mind completely blank as he stares at Zhongli, taking a moment to process the information
“Yes, the dragon and the phoenix in Liyuen culture represent—”
“—Oh my god how did I miss that?” Childe finishes, recalling a book of Liyuen traditions on his way to Liyue for the first time. (Truth be told he may have skimmed that chapter.)
“I— I initially bought them in a spur of the moment decision, and could not bring myself to tell you once I realised you didn’t know,” He explains, downcast eyes and hands fidgeting with themselves around Childe’s waist. “I’m sorry if—”
“You— You idiot! You dense idiot— you should’ve told me!” He’s anything but angry, but tired and exasperated, though living for the sight of a pulled apart Archon attempting to explain to Childe how he’d proposed to him and he didn’t even know .
“I was afraid that—”
Childe shuts him up by pecking him on the lips, kissing him delicately and briefly before pulling away with an exasperated sigh. “Gods above, yes, a thousand times over, yes but next time tell a guy when you propose to him?”
Childe can hear Zhongli’s heart slamming into his chest, watching with lovestruck eyes and an expression of falling over and over again into the sea. Then he smiles, delicately, and Childe’s heart winces in pain because of how utterly perfect he was. “I have a feeling that will not be a situation I will encounter ever again.”
A pause fills the air, a few stray birds chirps feeding into the end of the silence as the sun begins to peer past the horizon. “We should get going, it’s late. Or rather, early.”
“Right I.” Childe is the one that flushes in embarrassment this time, twiddling his thumbs. “Well I came here as a ‘spur of the moment decision’ and—”
“You didn’t inform the Tsaritsa.” Zhongli, if he had any hands that weren’t massaging circles into Childe hips, would’ve dragged one down his face. He instead chooses to sigh as Childe did earlier, truths of mortal stupidity dawning onto him. Maybe Gods and Mortals weren’t all that different, if this encounter served to prove anything. “I will write to her.”
“Do you even have merit over her?”
“I may not be an Archon, but I am still a god.”
Childe blinked, not a thought behind his irises. “How the hell does that even work?” Then he pauses for a second and continues, “You know what? I won’t ask. Let’s just go home.”
Zhongli, for all he’s worth, sighs amicably and leans in to peck Childe on the lips once more. “Please.” He asks, then moves to grab his hand as they slowly part to descend back into the harbour.