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The Abyss was largely monochromatic. It’s not that there weren’t colours, curling around the shapes and edges like fuzzy mirages, imperfect in their imitations of the ones known from Above, but the stifling presence washed everything into similar shades of darkness.
People thought there was no light in the Abyss too. Again, this was untrue; the light in the star-speckled void was just the direct opposite of anything that they might associate with the word.
So there was light and there were colours - mostly vivid violets and deep blues he knew he would find in his eyes, were he to look from just the correct angle.
Tartaglia usually didn’t care enough to bother.
Rather, he remembered the ashen greys and the dull red his own blood became, smeared over rocky ground that wavered under his feet like the surface of a deep lake. The curling branches that might have been trying to imitate trees and sickly green wisps of leaves still stubbornly clinging to them. The shiny fragments of black bones, all of it clawing at his eyes, as his ears ringed with howls and laughter.
The way the scenery around him flickered were he to look at it for too long, shattered reflections coming apart and fitting together anew, never correctly, but who was supposed to make sense of the thousand bloody pieces?
Inside a place tearing at the seams, desperately grasping at anything that might make it stay together for just another minute.
‘Remember’ actually might not be the right word. After all, you don't snap from ‘remembering’, shivering and with the acute knowledge of your existence. That you are right here , right now, and oh, how very easy it would be for something to change that. You don’t wake with steel already at your fingertips and the burning need to survive, to move, to run to fight to killkillkill.
Others might have called them nightmares, but that always seemed strange to him. Nightmares were made-up things, mirages of your own mind twisted into your personal horror show projected onto your eyelids, where you would never be able to run.
Why would he call his memories nightmares, when they stayed exactly as they had happened, vivid strokes painted with ichor of the world?
-
Ajax died in the Abyss - the little boy with too big dreams and too scared eyes winking out like a snuffed candle, not even a curl of smoke signifying that there might have once been a bright flame. But as it constantly did with itself, the starry void put him back together, collected the broken and scattered pieces and fit them anew, but just so slightly wrong.
And it continued to do so, every time the shards fell apart with a screech and a flash of red, clawing back to whatever passed as life down there. And what if this particular piece never belonged to the little boy to begin with? What if it sparkled with the darkness of a tear in the world and sung about survival over a world bathed in crimson?
The little boy was no more anyways.
-
Tartaglia reconstructed himself too many times to count. In the Abyss, to a warrior, a survivor; in the Fatui, to a soldier, a weapon; at home, to a brother, a protector. He was a broken mirror with too many sides, no reflection to call his own and so very useful because of that.
It was no wonder that he took to the masks so quickly, that ‘Childe’ became who he was the second Her Majesty’s command registered in his mind. Because down there you had to appear strong even when you were weak and laugh while charging at danger, even when all you wanted was to run and hide - because he forgot how not to pretend, how not to put up a front and smile with bared fangs.
Because he no longer knew who he was under the unfitting pieces, violently mashed together to make sun-red hair and eyes that seemed to devour all light.
Maybe that was also why he disliked the manipulations of his fellow Harbingers so much. Not because he was unable of such practices, nor because if not faced with impossible odds he didn’t know how he was supposed to become better - no, those were all true, but also because when he took up a role to play, he never really knew how to come back from it.
What did he even have to come back to.
-
There was a single green flower, its leaves curling upwards towards the grey sky, lined with frost and gently trembling in the wind.
Ajax, freshly out of the Abyss, with blood still dripping into his eyes and a death grip around the rusted handle of his sword, couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. It burned, like staring into the sun, like clawing his eyes out, but he was too afraid to close them, in fear of the green mirage disappearing as he did so.
He never really figured out how he escaped. The memories of his last days are fuzzier than most, with the sort of desperation that comes from trying to catch falling drops of water from white-bright sky.
The more effort you put into it, the faster they disappear.
-
He never had any mirrors in his quarters. He removed them himself, unwilling to show even the tiniest vulnerability to his underlings, smashing the reflective surfaces to pieces and laughing about the ‘bad luck’ sure to follow.
As if anything could be worse than what he had already overcome.
-
‘Childe’ stepped out to the golden banks of Liyue, freshly put together behind closed doors and broken mirrors. Cheeky and daring and friendly, it was a role he put on easier than most.
And in the bustling harbour, he fit like a glove. Weaving through the crowd with light step and eyes flitting around the sights, it was so easy to conceal wariness as excitement. The glint of light bouncing from mora coins distracting from the flat depths of his eyes and smile flashing under the cherry red mask.
Yes, it was very easy to feel at home in Liyue. It was precisely because of that he didn’t trust it for a second.
-
He wasn’t Ajax, when the world spat him out like a rotten mouthful upon the dazzling, brilliant frozen white, dirtied by black sludge and crimson smears.
He was not ‘Ajax’, but he continued to hold the name close, for in the absence of the constant threat of not-being, he didn’t really have anything else to cling onto.
-
It was Childe, who danced seamlessly and laughed amongst the sun-tipped stone worn down by eons of history. It was Tartaglia, who looked around him with searching eyes and fingers twitching with promised blood of divinity. It was… whatever reflected pieces remained of Ajax, who breathed in the mix of spices and mountain air and wondered about impossibilities.
He became himself when he met Zhongli.
A living contradiction. Someone all his instincts insisted shouldn’t be, shouldn’t survive - the consultant was not weak, not like the faceless masses of inconsequential people, so he should know, should realise, that the kindness he showed so readily can only be used against him.
There was a line when you stopped being an uninteresting part of the scenery and became prey. Ajax stepped over it at fourteen years old and paid the highest price.
So why was Zhongli seemingly ignoring all the weak spots he bared readily to he world? He knew another actor, could recognise the flickering illusion hiding a hunter from its prey, but his companion was so painfully honest it baffled him.
He trailed after Zhongli, like a lost puppy. At first out of obligation, then puzzlement, then wonder and last of all desperation. He threw his time and attention to those shiny shoes and hung upon every word spilled into the night breeze, because most of all he wanted to figure out how the consultant could be so unbothered by showing his back.
Zhongli was bright and golden and Tartaglia Ajax Childe wished to most of all understand him. Because his brilliance hurt, hurt every time the man went on another tangent about ancient pottery, complimented a masterly done meal, strolled through the streets with his hands folded behind his back, gazed over blue waves and setting sun.
It hurt in every piece of tar-stained fragments that hissed under the light and sometimes Childe wondered what it would be like to burn.
He wanted to tear Zhongli down to his stained level, and he wanted to raise him up to the clouds, so that nothing could ever touch him again. He wanted to curl close, so that some of the warmth seeped into his darkness-chilled bones, and he wanted to run away and forget the amber flickers in those ethereal eyes. He wanted to make him bleed, to drink that blood, so that the radiance would smear all over his skin like golden fingerprints, and he wanted to open his own veins and present the worthless life-essence which coursed through them as a hopelessly inadequate offering.
-
There was a yawning pit in his chest, a black hole of constant cold that no amount of frost from Her Majesty’s palace could ever compare to. An empty den of bloody wolves, shrieking in his mind about the hunt.
When the pain stabbed him so hard he couldn’t breathe, he went out into the wilderness and returned covered in blood that wasn’t his, never satisfied, hanging on by a last thread of honey light.
Let it be known to the world that he, Tartaglia Childe Ajax , spent every second growing stronger. He had to, for the blue-violet monsters crouched in wait over every corner, every step shadowed by their cackling cries, the starry void breaking and breaking and trying to snatch him back. He was an escaped piece of an ever-changing puzzle, misplaced and pulled under the currents of red lanterns and lacquered wood.
Shifting, reflecting back the desires of anyone that looked upon him, beauty always changing according to the eye of the beholder. Fluid, like water stretched too thin, too far, too much, never able to truly snap back together.
The old lady with the kites smiled at him and he felt the questions rising to the tip of his tongue again. Who was he, where did he end and where did he start, why did everybody look at him so kindly and why should he not tear all that away in a single mad cackle.
A merchant suggested to him a new recipe to try to fill in his sunken cheeks. A trio of children demanded him to play pirates with them. A young lady read to him her poetry drafts.
He felt like screaming, like sobbing, like sinking downdowndown into the ground, because everybody here had sunlight in their eyes, had airiness in their soul, tenacity in their bones and warm blood in their veins and Tartaglia wanted to sink his teeth into their throats and watch it splatter over the cobblestones.
-
Swaying on his feet on the goldgoldgold floor of the Northland Bank, he felt like he was breaking for the very first time again. Stardust clogging his tongue and shadows snapping at his feet and all his stolen voices shrieking.
Why. Why, when he played so perfectly. When he pretended so well, that he had managed to fool himself too. When he moulded himself, painstakingly, into the shape of something more than an unholy beast.
Why, when he shakily glued together whatever shards could have remained of the closest thing he had to a heart, and presented them to the one person who made him feel like he wasn’t just desperately clinging together.
Why. Why was the fragile glass of his trust thrown to the floor, to shatter into dust and void and stars and never ever be able to pretend to be together again.
He looked upon the god masquerading in human skin as violet sparks clawed at the edges of his vision and felt like he was falling again.
Really, it was his own fault. For forgetting what he really was - what he was not.
For ever daring to want more.
-
Sometimes, he wondered what it would be like to show somebody.
He tried, of course, when he first came back. Still unused to the rules of the game, the tick of the metronome setting the tempo to the scarlet dance of water blades, unsure of the best way how to twist himself around to fit.
He tried to tell of the too-bright darkness and the three months of pain and what it felt like to die for the fourth time; and when words failed him he tried to show it, in bloody handprints and wide, dark eyes. He tried and he tried and he failed, because no one had been listening anyway.
He didn’t understand back then. His parents called for Ajax and he might have once been him, but Ajax died and what remained were badly put together reflections, which he desperately tried to hold close and present as something worthwhile. He didn’t understand why they called him a liar, why they cowered from the glint of steel in his hands when he bared his teeth for them, didn’t realise that the most important rule of the game is to meet expectations flawlessly.
His attempts ended up in shards, spilled over their home like fresh snow, with his father’s screaming and his mother’s sobbing and the unfamiliar men in uniforms taking him away.
He knew better now than to cling to such childish hopes and desires, but couldn’t help it. Something in Liyue played at the right strings of his forgotten dreams and for the first time in years made him yearn for understanding.
Childe wanted to cut open his chest, wrench his ribs out of the way, bare the gaping abyss between his lungs and hope that Zhongli saw the constellations too. For him, he wanted to leave the shifting shadows and come into the light, even if it burned his eyes and filled his mouth with ash.
-
They clashed in Guili Plains, ancient history twisting around their ankles and pulling them into the muddy marshes.
Once, he would have begged. On his knees, desperate to fulfil every wish, desperate to be used. He would have screamed, pleaded, that he can become whoever, whatever Zhongli desired, the most useful of all tools, so that the consultant might keep him around for just a second longer.
An echo of a woman’s voice, telling him that if he won’t be useful she will leave him in the darkdarkdark to rot; the tingling frost of Her Majesty’s declaration of her newest weapon; the tense words of his father that he was only allowed back because he came with gifts for the kids.
He pretended that the tightness in his throat wasn’t such pleading rising up.
But he was accustomed to lying, to himself, to the world, so it wasn’t that hard. No, what was throwing him off, distorted images flickering behind his eyelids and the ground shifting ever so slightly to the left, was that all of his understanding had scattered like leaves in the wind the moment a glowing chess piece revealed itself floating over a familiar palm.
He was wrong, everything he thought he knew about Zhongli was wrong. He thought the man was honest, but how could he, when he wasn’t a man at all? How could he not be unbothered by showing his weaknesses to all, when his strength was enough to level mountains and raise them in the same breath?
Were they ever real? Was anything ever real?
Childe was fraying along the edges, a mask that had grown too real, its roots sinking into his skull and shattered pieces fitting together in not completely unpleasant way for the first time in years. He had lost sight of where the illusions ended and the chaos began, dared to forget his role, dared to hope.
The jagged seams of him were bleeding starlight and he has only ever known one way how to force the world back into clarity.
The clash of water blades and stone spears was something he used to dream about - so why did he feel so hollow now?
-
‘Tartaglia’ was the new name bestowed upon him by Her Majesty, but it was not a new identity. No, the weapon was there a long time before he first knelt upon the frozen floor etched with eternal snowflakes.
He bowed his head, accepted the mask, accepted the rank and put a title to a reflection of him that bared its bloodied teeth in taunt to the world and wished to see it burn, just so that nothing could ever stand a chance of coming close enough to hurt again.
‘Ajax’ was the name he got from his parents and lost in the Abyss, between the violet folds of reality and ever-shifting scenery. But he still clung to it, even when any ownership he could claim died in the smears of blood dirtying his rusted sword.
He clutched the broken reflection close, incomplete mirror showing nothing but distorted mirages of what had been, but could never be again.
‘Childe’… Childe was the strangest of them all. Because he started as just another mask, a front with fuzzy edges and viper’s teeth, but became so much more.
Somehow, without him noticing, the scorching sun of Liyue melted the fragments of that reflection into something a little more whole, a little more solid, a little more real.
-
Zhongli fought like a force of nature, every inch the god of old and Childe didn't understand how he could have ever thought of him as anything other than divine. The deep-blue pieces his soul sang in face of the addicting thrill and his chest heaved with forbidden screams.
He twisted right, a clap of clashing steel, earth and honey coloured presence weaving around him. The hole in his chest was twisting onto itself, like a star ready to collapse, except he would never go out in an explosion of light.
A twitch of the radiant polearm, the shifting of feet; he saw the strike, he saw the attack coming and he didn’t twist left.
He didn’t feel the pain either.
A shout, a clatter of weapon, an impact of body hitting the ground, a pressure over the painful dampness over his side. Childe opened his eyes and felt sunlight spilling over him.
Oh. He must have let his thoughts go too unchecked.
Something in him was screaming, something in him was crying and something in him was laughing, but he couldn’t focus on any of that - not with how the golden eyes had gone wide with worry, not with how the clever lips had started sounding his name in desperation.
Not with the pleas whispered into his hair, not with the sparkle of power healing his hip in tingling light, not with the way his limbs were cradled carefully. Not with the confessions laid bare before the orange dawn.
Oh. He shouldn’t, all his instincts screaming at him for foolishly hoping again, but he couldn’t help it.
Because Zhongli held him like he mattered and willingly cut his palms over the sharp edges that remained of the bright-eyed boy that stumbled down a crack in the world.
“Please,” Ajax pleaded, desperate longing twisting his fingers in the god’s clothing. Please, he would give anything, everything that he was and even more, everything that he wasn’t, the Abyss, the Celestia, the world, all of it and his own bloody pieces of star-stained soul. Please, he just needed… needed…
Zhongli clutched him tighter, with the unwavering certainty of an immortal, glowing gold and solid as the mountains surrounding them. “Always,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to Ajax’s temple.
“For you, I have more than enough to spare.”
Tartaglia Childe Ajax closed his eyes, cocooned inside dragon’s coils, warm for the first time since the world turned itself around as he fell, and basked in the light of the rising sun.