Chapter Text
It was a particularly beautiful day in Liyue Harbor, the city bustling with life and activity, the smell of the sea wafting off the water on a slight breeze. Childe savored the feeling as he walked among the crowd, eyes searching for his destination.
“Master Jiangxue!” Childe raised a hand in greeting, smiling warmly as he made his way over to the man’s cart. “Good afternoon!”
“Good afternoon, Master Childe,” The man said with a grin. “Here for one of my steamed buns?”
“Naturally!” Childe leaned up against the cart, smile wide. “How have you been, my friend?”
“Excellent,” Jiangxue answered, already moving to make Childe one of his signature buns. The best in all of Liyue Harbor, Zhongli had told Childe one evening, several months ago. Zhongli had been right — but then again, he wasn’t often wrong.
“That’s good,” Childe said, letting his gaze fall upon the moving crowd. He saw Little Zuo running to catch up with his mother, could hear Ying’er’s sultry tone as she peddled her wares from the entrance of her shop just down the street, watched as Kun, one of the Millelith, passed by while on patrol. “Anything exciting happen these past few days?”
Jiangxue raised an eyebrow. “Looking for gossip, my friend?”
“How could you say such a thing, Master Jiangxue?” Childe gasped in mock offense, clutching a hand over his heart. He laughed, dropping the act. “I most certainly am. Bank administration is an absolute tedium.”
“Well, then I can certainly help you,” Jiangxue said, a twinkle in his eye. He handed Childe his steamed bun, and Childe accepted it wholeheartedly, enthusiastically taking a bite. Jiangxue leaned forward, lowering his voice just slightly. “I’m sure you already know this, but I have no doubt it’ll stoke your ego to hear me say it, so I suppose I will. People have already decided they like you better than the new one.”
Mouth full of bun, Childe made a curious noise. He swallowed. “Ah, I’m not sure I’m following,” he said, voice light. “The new what?”
“The new Fatui Harbinger in town, of course,” Jiangxue said with a chuckle, and Childe’s blood ran cold. Jiangxue continued, blind to the way Childe had frozen in place. “She’s quite rude, you know. Walking around like she owns the place. Nothing like you at all, Master Childe!”
In Liyue, the walls have ears. La Signora must have forgotten that — or perhaps she’d never cared enough to know.
“Master Childe?” Childe shook himself out of his shock to focus on Jiangxue, who was peering at him in concern. “Are you alright?”
“Ah, yes, my apologies,” Childe said, slipping back into his role smoothly. “I was simply lost in thought, and perhaps a bit worried about if she was making trouble for you all. I wouldn’t want that.”
“We know, Master Childe,” Jiangxue said, fondness coloring his tone. “Liyue Harbor has come to know you well these past few months. We know that her actions do not reflect your desires.” They reflect those of the Cryo Archon.
Childe knew that the people of Liyue Harbor liked him, and many of them even trusted him. Childe matched his element perfectly — like the water he commanded, he was flexible, seeping into even the smallest cracks, molding himself carefully into the shape that others needed him to be, whether that was the friendly diplomat, caring friend, scheming bank owner, or the terrifying Eleventh Fatui Harbinger. He spent months carefully building relationships so that he might move freely through Liyue Harbor.
But he was never so naive as to believe that their trust of him extended to the Fatui as a whole, even if diplomacy was the supposed reason for his presence. It appeared that this distinction served him well. Childe took another bite of his bun, smiling as he did so.
“I’m glad to hear that, Jiangxue,” he said genuinely. He sighed, taking his final bite. “I suppose I must go back to the bank now,” he said wistfully, gazing out over the harbor and the far-off mountains.
Jiangxue chuckled. “Godspeed, Master Childe,” he said sympathetically. “Perhaps you should find a new job. Desk work does not particularly suit you.”
“No,” Childe said, a slight smile at the corner of his mouth. “It is quite contrary to my personality. However, it is what I am doing for now,” he said mournfully. “Think of me as you gaze out over sea.”
“So dramatic,” Jiangxue said, laughing and shooing Childe away. “Have a good day, Master Childe!”
“You as well, Master Jiangxue,” Childe called back over his shoulder with a laugh. “May all your buns sell out!”
Just before he was out of earshot, Jiangxue called back, “No need to worry. They always do!” Childe chuckled to himself as he melted back into the crowd. His amusement fell away at once, head spinning with the gravity of the information Jiangxue had imparted to him.
La Signora was in the city, and considering he had not been notified though any official channels, it was certain that she did not want him to know that she was there. He frowned, slipping through the crowd and making his way down the steps to the harbor. That wouldn’t do.
La Signora was one of the more subtle of the Harbingers — if it were Scaramouche in town, his plan would be quite straightforward, and it would involve as much violence as possible. Signora, on the other hand, was calculating. She enjoyed her clever schemes, and that made her dangerous. No doubt she was already undermining him in an attempt to seize the gnosis of the Geo Archon for herself.
She might have stolen the Anemo Archon’s just a few weeks prior, but one paltry gnosis from the weakest of the Seven would not be enough to quench Signora’s desire for glory. She was selfish like that.
Tartaglia scanned the harbor, looking for a specific familiar face. If Signora really was in Liyue Harbor as he feared, he knew who would know where she was staying. He slipped into his next role smoothly, rushing up to Ivanovich’s stand with as harried an air as he could possibly exude.
“Ah, Ivanovich,” Childe said, slipping into Snezhnayan, brisk, businesslike and a bit breathless. “Just the man I was hoping to find.”
“Master Childe?” Ivanovich sounded slightly concerned, but mostly wary. Where the people of Liyue took Childe’s acts at face value, Ivanovich, being Snezhnayan, knew better. Not that he would ever verbalize his reservations to anyone. “Are you quite alright?”
“Ah just fine,” Childe said, waving his concern aside. “I was hoping that you might have seen Signora. I have to give her a report, but she’s keeping a bit of a low profile for once. She won’t even tell me where she’s staying.” Childe snorted. “She’s insufferable, as always. In any case, most of the people I’ve spoken to say they haven’t seen her. I was hoping a fellow Snezhnayan might have had better luck recognizing her.”
Ivanovich nodded. “Ah, Signora. Yes. I believe I saw her yesterday when she arrived. She was heading up towards Yujing Terrace, if you wanted to try and find her residence.”
“Of course, I should have known,” Childe said with a small laugh, running a hand through his hair. “She has far too expensive a taste to stay anywhere else.” He smiled at Ivanovich. “Thank you very much for your assistance.”
“Certainly, Master Childe,” Ivanovich said, inclining his head. “I wish you luck in your endeavors.”
Childe spared him a final curt nod, and then turned on his heel, returning the way he came back into the bustling center of the city. He glanced at the sun above him as he walked, carefully sidestepping other members of the crowd — he had to be back at the bank within the hour, or Ekaterina would begin to worry. He frowned, and swiftly altered his course, deciding to first check in at the bank.
The agents stationed in Liyue all knew his fondness for debt collection. Excusing himself from work for the afternoon for such a thing would be quite in character, and would give him ample time to find Signora on his own.
Still, he had only just set foot on the second story of the bank when he heard a voice, haughty and carelessly loud and unbearably familiar.
“He’s already agreed.” Childe froze in the hallway, one foot still on the stairs. Signora was here — no doubt expecting him to still be gone for lunch. She sounded almost bored. “As long as Tartaglia cooperates, I’ll have his gnosis in my grasp within the week.”
Swallowing hard, Childe glanced around the hallway. Signora was new to Liyue — very new. If she had been here for even a fraction of the time Childe had, she would know that the walls have ears. Apparently, in this case, his own were included. Carefully, he slipped behind a pillar just as she rounded the corner, heels clicking against marble.
“My lady, how can you be sure of Lord Tartaglia’s cooperation? Much less the cooperation of the Geo Archon?” Ekaterina. Childe couldn’t even muster the emotion to feel betrayed. Betrayal wasn’t anything new.
“Tartaglia is a simple creature,” Signora said. A sigh. “He has none of the precision these situations require. He is blindly loyal, and lives for the battlefield and little else.” There was a pause, and Childe heard some rustling, perhaps of papers. “As for Rex Lapis, he is the God of Contracts. I doubt he would renege on our terms.”
Once again, Tartaglia struggled to summon enough emotion to feel anything beyond mild annoyance. Funny that Signora should say such things about him when it had been him stationed in Liyue these past two years, trying to salvage the reputation of the Fatui all on his own while she and the others ran about recklessly, stealing the Anemo Archon’s gnosis in broad daylight (Signora), experimenting on civilians (Dottore), and wreaking chaos wherever they went (Scaramouche).
But then again, the perception that he was nothing more than a brainless, bloodthirsty young upstart had served him well in the past. It was a comfort to know that not even the most cunning of his colleagues had seen through his facade.
Well. The brainless facade. The part about being a bloodthirsty young upstart was entirely true.
He refocused on the conversation at hand. Somehow, she made an agreement with Rex Lapis, who was apparently not dead. Interesting, and entirely unexpected. For a moment, Childe wondered how she managed to pull it off.
Rex Lapis had to be planning something. Otherwise, offering a trade for his gnosis made little sense — what could the Tsaritsa and La Signora have to offer that could possibly match it in value? He must have needed the Tsaritsa’s assistance in whatever he was planning. Furthermore, this plan involved Childe, though he was clearly not meant to know of his part in said plan. That meant that whatever he was supposed to do was something Rex Lapis and La Signora expected him to do already, without any further prodding from them.
His goal before this moment had been to find the Exuvia, find the gnosis. Retrieve it, and deliver it to the Tsaritsa. Obviously, the plan would have to change with this new information. If Rex Lapis was not dead, then the Exuvia was a distraction. Tartaglia would have to force his hand another way.
Wrapped up in his thoughts, he must have missed Ekaterina’s response. Signora was already speaking again. “For such an ancient Archon, he was nothing like I expected.”
She paused, and at her next words, Childe’s mind went blank with shock, all scheming abruptly halted.
“Of all the many things he could spend his time doing in Liyue, he chooses to work as a consultant for a funeral parlor?” Childe held his breath, head spinning, as Signora laughed, footsteps getting fainter. “To each their own, I suppose,” she said, clearly amused, and then she was gone.
As soon as she faded from view, Childe let out the breath he’d been holding, falling back against the wall heavily. Zhongli, the Geo Archon?
It made a sick sort of sense. In fact, looking back on it now, it was dead obvious. Nobody could have that much knowledge of Liyue’s history — Childe had written it off, telling himself Zhongli was simply a noble with an extensive education. But even when speaking with experts in their field, Zhongli’s knowledge always far outstripped their own, regardless of the subject matter. No human could possess such vast, boundless knowledge.
Childe had always been enraptured by the way he spoke of Liyue’s history as if he’d been there. Childe realized with horror that he had. The designs sewn into his coat, the way his eyes were exactly the color of Cor Lapis. Childe groaned. The Statues of the Seven in Liyue were the spitting image of Zhongli. How had he never noticed that?
It even explained why he cared so little for money. Zhongli was Morax. Mora was named after him. Considering Zhongli’s atrocious lack of understanding of Mora, it seemed like a cosmic joke. Childe laughed, just slightly hysterical. He ran a shaking hand through his hair.
“Alright,” Childe muttered to himself. “Massive change of plan then, I suppose.”
________________
Childe liked the occasional scheme, but most of the time, the simpler the plan was, the better it worked. It was a lesson Signora would never learn — she liked the style points that came with elaborate set-ups with particularly nasty “gotcha!” moments at the end.
Take the fact that she confronted the Anemo Archon outside his own church, kicked him in the stomach, and called him a rat in front of the person who arguably posed the greatest threat to the entire Fatui operation — the mysterious wildcard that was the Traveler.
Did Signora have any idea how hard it was to get the Traveler to grant him even an iota of trust after the shit she’d pulled?
Now that he was thinking about it, she probably did, and reveled in it.
Rolling his eyes, Childe considered his plan. As previously mentioned, it was quite simple.
Zhongli was close with Childe. Tartaglia was a Fatui Harbinger with one job in Liyue — retrieve the Geo Archon’s gnosis. Zhongli was the Geo Archon. When one considered these three facts together, the simplest plan available was obvious.
The next time Childe and Zhongli were alone, Childe would take his gnosis and successfully bypass whatever weird scheme he had with Signora concerning the missing Exuvia. Then Childe would find himself up a gnosis, down a friend.
Betrayal wasn’t anything new, and he was plenty comfortable being on either end of the equation. He wasn’t troubled. So when Zhongli came to him one afternoon during his lunch break and suggested a refreshing afternoon stroll through the wild headlands just above Liyue Harbor, Childe was only too happy to oblige him, smile sharp.
He got close.
So close.
But when his fingertips came to rest lightly on top of Zhongli’s chest, the silk of his shirt smooth to touch, he realized with horror, I can’t do this.
He drew a deep, shuddering breath and leaned into Zhongli, fingertips burning, but he could not bring himself to break through the skin, to harness the Delusion and tear the gnosis from Zhongli’s chest.
The question was not Childe’s own innocence, or the horror of the act itself. His hands had long been stained red, blood tracing the lines of his palm and dripping steadily from his fingertips. In comparison to many of the things he’d done, taking Zhongli’s gnosis was practically the work of an upstanding citizen.
But here, in Zhongli’s arms, the gnosis quite literally at his fingertips, Childe found that he could not hurt him. At the thought of hurting Zhongli, his body simply refused, rebelled against his own will.
Childe knew he was a pawn. That was fine with him. He had a family to take care of, so failure was not an option. The Tsaritsa was cold as one would expect from the Cryo Archon, and all the Harbingers knew there was only one price that was to be paid for failure, and it was blood.
He remembered a cold night, many years ago, the kitchen filled with the sound of Tonia’s sobbing, his mother begging him not to leave, not while the family was in the midst of this terrible tragedy. He remembered leaving anyway. The tragedy, after all, was his doing, the result of his own failure, and he swore to himself that day, hot, angry tears burning behind his eyes, that it would never happen again.
You cannot run from debt. Childe knew this down to the marrow of his bones. But that day in Liyue as Zhongli held him in his arms atop Mt. Tianheng, the air warm as it could never be in Snezhnaya, the day when Childe failed to take the Geo Archon’s gnosis — on that day, he knew he had no other option than to try.
His failure would mean blood. But by running, he knew he would anger the Tsaritsa, and maybe, if he were lucky, the blood she would thirst for would be his, rather than Tonia’s or Teucer’s.
“A disloyal Harbinger is to be discarded,” she had said, eyes chilly blue, hard as ice and just as unyielding. She snapped the neck of the previous eleventh harbinger on the stone steps of Zapolyarny Palace, and as her blood seeped into the snow, the Tsaritsa turned to fix those eyes, so eerie and pale, on Childe. “I do hope that you will prove a suitable replacement.”
Tartaglia, back then still so young, so fresh from his months in the abyss, had simply smiled, unfeeling, unfazed. “Of course, Tsaritsa.”
In the present, he stilled, all these realizations rushing through his mind with the force of a tsunami. Zhongli, perceptive as always, noticed.
“Childe?” His voice was deep as the ocean, and just as comforting, his concern bleeding through with painful transparency. Zhongli didn’t do subtlety — it was something Childe both loved and loathed about him.
After a long moment, Childe sighed, mask slipping back into place easily, as if it had never slipped. “I’m sorry, Zhongli. I simply was reminded of a particularly unpleasant task I have to complete later for the bank. It’s really nothing.”
As always, Zhongli took his words at face value, amber eyes filling at once with sympathy. Childe wondered how one could walk these lands for nearly six thousand years, yet still be so trusting. “I trust that whatever it is, you will find a solution,” Zhongli murmured, his fingers tightening just slightly where they rested on Childe’s waist in order to draw him closer. “I’m sorry to see it upsetting you so much.”
Childe sighed, leaning into the contact, mind racing. This was uncharted territory. Childe had always been loyal — it was what he was best at. No matter how gruesome or distasteful the task his Tsaritsa gave to him, he had always completed it. This was the first time he had run across something that he simply could not do, and he did not enjoy the feeling.
He knew that these feelings for Zhongli could be the end of him. Actually, they would. Childe, the eleventh of the Fatui Harbingers, a son, a brother, and apparently, a traitor, would have to be no more. He would need to vanish into thin air.
He knew he would not even tell Zhongli, would not warn him against whoever it was that they would send after him. For a moment, Childe considered it. Would it be Il Dottore? Or perhaps Pulcinella or Scaramouche, if the Tsaritsa really wanted to end things quickly.
You see, at the end of the day, Childe would still like to take Zhongli’s gnosis. It would be by far the easiest course of action. Childe had always — up until this point, anyway — been an expert at separating business from his personal life, and he liked to make his personal life as easy as possible for himself by doing his job, and doing it well. Failing at his most important mission yet was not doing his job well.
But at the end of the day, Childe was a pragmatist, even if reality nearly scared him to death. Somehow, while he wasn’t looking, his feelings for Zhongli got out of control. He wouldn’t be able to take the gnosis now, and that wouldn’t be changing anytime soon.
So he had two options: Leave the gnosis and return to Snezhnaya empty handed, which would no doubt result in the execution of his family right before his eyes followed by his own, or two, disappear, and run from debt for as long as he could before it caught up and he was torn to pieces by the Tsaritsa herself.
He breathed in deep, taking in the scent of dark soil and the breeze off the harbor, his head buried in Zhongli’s shoulder. The other man’s arms rested lightly on his waist, grounding him in the midst of his internal conflict.
“Everything will be alright, Childe,” Zhongli said, voice deep with the self-confidence of the divine, of one who had lived six thousand years. Childe bit back a sob, and smiled instead.
“Yes, of course.”
He thought of Tonia’s soft smiles, of Teucer’s enthusiasm. He let his eyes fall shut, and he sighed, long suffering. At the end of the day, it was no choice at all.
He was going to run.