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So far north in Teyvat, where a sailor would have to circle over the globe to reach the next shore, a man can do nothing but bide his time when a snowstorm hits. It is an indescribable sort of viciousness that bites across the land; over the course of a long night, kept awake by wolf-wind howls, Varka has tried and failed to express the particular cruelty of Snezhnaya’s arctic. Perhaps he was never meant to write it well, though—to send word home about a place of misery would not bode well, and is a far cry from the man he strives to be—so he crumples the letter he’d started and feeds it to the flames.
He instead writes to a happier end: all of those brought along on the expedition are accounted for and faring well, and what is missing—bone-deep warmth, the assurances of home—are things that can be recovered in due time. He pens by firelight a pleasant letter that is, in truth, no worse than misleading. The ink dries, the letter is folded, and with a tilt of his hand to press the sigil of his ring into molten wax, it’s sealed.
In a few hours he will hand the letter off to Mika, who will personally deliver it to Mondstadt—and then, with the boy gone, Varka’s secret will be a little bit safer.
Mika is not untrustworthy: he’s quite the opposite. His steadfastness is what earned him a place in the expedition. For such a young boy, he has honorable character, and takes up any task without complaint. To that end, he is at times too eager to be of use and has a habit of stumbling upon matters too serious. Earlier in the evening, he had almost found what Varka kept in the shadows of his tent; Varka had just barely dismissed it as a trick of the firelight.
“What is it that teenagers are meant to do?” Varka wonders aloud now. “Not heed to the every beck and call of work, that’s for sure…”
The fire of his shelter is modest, the tongues of flame hardly reaching more than a few inches from the firewood before tapering off into smoke and air. His expedition had stumbled upon the bare bones of an long-abandoned camp, with enough supplies of their own to rebuild something sturdy enough to withstand the blizzard: strong canvas and tarp to catch the bitter winds and a generous supply of warming potions, the effects of which were safer and couldn’t be blown away like flames. Still, he’d built a small fire for himself once his tent had been erected; he has nothing against alchemic ingenuity but he likes the homely feel of a proper blaze.
“Sentimental,” he’d been told when he’d first stroked the fire to life. The word had been given like a critique, the syllables pronounced clear and hard. Varka laughed, continuing until the fire filled out. “You make a home out of anything.”
“Only when I’m with you.”
“Then why adventure?” the man had asked, his inhumanity as clear as day.
“How else would I get to see you?”
“Give up on your reputation as a straight-shot man.”
“Said as if it would be so easy!” Varka had exclaimed, looking into the shadows of his tent made deeper, darker, by the firelight, into the place where his lover took residence.
“No, not easy,” was the reply Varka got. “Just necessary.”
The comment rested in the back of his mind for all of the time it took to pen his letter, in which Varka shared his meeting with the very man he sheltered—il Capitano, who should be more foe than friend and who ought to be held at least at arm's length, not a few breaths away.
He first met Capitano years ago, at a time when he thought himself to be a man but was, in truth, hardly beyond his adolescence. Varka was in his beginning years as the Grandmaster of the Ordo Favonius, somewhere between confident and braggadocious in personality. He’d been too boastful when he and Capitano crossed blades for that first and only time and for the weeks he was in recovery, he resented letting his ego ride so high—but now he’s got only the scars of that fight, ended too early, and he thinks there could be no greater thing for his body to carry, no greater trophy.
What remains of his ego thirsts for another match with Capitano, sure of his victory over the Harbinger, certain that if not for the unfavorable conditions of that first fight, he’d have won it. The rest of him, with a desire cultivated in the years between that battle and the present, has gone on to want something softer, more tender.
Oh, how old he’s grown.
Maybe he should retire. When he returns to Mond, he has no doubt it will be a prosperous place; Jean Gunnhildr is nothing short of capable with the reins of command. The city will be in good—no, better —shape in her hands than his, and Varka will feel less like a bad man for the things he shelters, for the things his heart has taken to.
Sentimental, Capitano had called him. Maybe he’s right.
“Come to bed. You’re staring your way to blindness by gazing at that fire.”
Varka hardly noticed the way his thoughts had wandered. Old, indeed—caught up in his ponderings, more present in mind than in body.
“Bed’s a generous term,” he says with a huff of laughter, getting up from his chair. The corner of the tent designated for rest holds no frame nor mattress; it’s just a pile of shoddy pillows and moth-holed blankets that will keep him warm with enough burrowing. “I miss my bed, all big and canopied. Comfortable enough to keep you trapped there until the sun’s high in the sky.”
Varka shifts his eyepatch from his left eye to his right; the left is adjusted to darkness while his right eye rests from the light, and Varka can see well-enough with the weak illumination on this end of the tent. Capitano has shrugged off some layers of armor but whether he is skin or shadow beneath it all, Varka is yet to discover—but still, there is a naked quality to him like this, with just enough light to catch the valleys of his muscles. Capitano reaches over the nest of blankets for his cape, misleadingly white and pure, and holds it out to Varka.
“You’ll need it,” he says. “The temperatures will continue to drop.”
Varka has a cape of his own, fur-lined, made from the pelts of some old hunt he can no longer recall—but farther away from the fire, the cold is quick to remind him of his circumstances.
“Big softie,” Varka says, kneeling down into the pig-pile of cushions and throws to receive Capitano’s cape and wrap it around himself.
“You’re a mess,” Capitano tells him. It’s no critique, just an observation. Three steel-clawed fingers comb through the scruff of Varka’s beard, along the curve of his chin and the soft skin just beneath. Each claw is dangerously sharp and could, in less than a second, have Varka’s blood spilling onto them. “Your heart rate used to spike to the heavens when I touched you like this.”
“The thrill of it isn’t lost on me,” Varka says, even when he knows Capitano needs no assurance.
“Your pupils continue to dilate when you look at me.”
“Am I so obvious?” Varka says, feigning dismay before looking at Capitano with a crooked smile. “Or are you just attuned to me and ready to admit your attachment?”
“I’ve never denied my bond to you, Varka.”
“Such a diplomat,” Varka groans. “Such a penchant for mediation…”
“I’m impartial to needless banter.”
“Oh, you don’t say?”
“Silver-tongued trickery and semantic quibbling are beneath me, and your longwindedness exhausts me.”
“And still, you call me to bed.” Varka at last lies down, on his side and propping himself up on one elbow to look at Capitano. “And still, you entertain my bickering. What a miracle! If not for that damned helmet, I’d kiss you.”
“My helmet’s never stopped you.”
Varka leans in, placing a trail of kisses along the steel jaw of the helm. His breath runs hot, fogging the metal, and Capitano exhales heavy enough for him to hear. The breath is a subtle discharge of rapture, and the finest thing Varka has heard in weeks.
“Can you feel it?”
Capitano does not answer. He rarely does, when Varka starts along this line of questioning. Capitano vows there is no man underneath his armor; he vows that beneath the metal is nothing more than a void of abyssal fabric and that his forged exterior is steelwork that barely contains the expanse of him. If I were a mere man, he’d said once, in a post-pleasure haze, I would be long dead.
And yet, Varka knows better.
He thinks he does, anyways. It is not often he and Capitano share a bed, or a semblance of one, like this; more often than not, the whole of this world yawns between them. Nonetheless, there have been nights where Varka was not alone at the edge of his dreams. He swears to something solid beneath the armor, something hard that his palms have wandered, just warm enough to be living.
Regardless of whether it be armor or something beneath that Varka feels, Capitano is hard and unyielding. Varka doesn’t know who he loves or what he lies with, but he trusts it. And, as if he were young in this love, he hopes there never comes a day he is proven wrong or forced to make a choice between the things he has given his faith to. Even when he knows better, he hopes.
Such is the heart of any Mondstadtian worth their salt.