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“Can a heart break if one doesn’t beat?” Venti mused. His legs swung across Xiao’s lap lazily, his back braced by the other’s arm. A flicker of something unknown flashed his viridescent eyes.
He was drunk.
He was drunk on Xiao's presence, really. It was a dizzying, comforting—maddening feeling, like drifting through a hazy dream he didn’t want to wake from. Xiao’s fingers curled around Venti’s waist instinctively, as if afraid he might slip away into the next breeze. Golden orbs locked into aquamarines, catlike, unreadable. Xiao did not answer right away. Silence hung ripe until the curtain of moonlight faltered behind the clouds.
“Your heart beats, Venti,” Xiao said, quietly.
Campfire crackled in those eyes, those eyes of melted sun as he spoke. The bard knew he was treading on invisible cracks. Cracks that aren’t meant to be filled, aren’t meant to be touched and toyed. But being a bard was all about entertaining. Tonight, he couldn’t help the urge.
“Mine doesn’t. Yours does, at least,” sea glass eyes gleamed under fluttering wisps of dark hair.
Venti’s fingers twitched, itching. He flattened his palm against Xiao’s stomach, letting it slide slowly upwards, trailing the thin fabric with ease. From his ribs, to his chest, and settled where the cage thumped—thumped—thumped with life. His palm pressed closer, relishing each quicken in rhythm.
Xiao’s breath fumbled, heart skipped beneath Venti’s hand. It was barely enough to be noticed unless one was listening—but Venti didn’t have to listen. He knows. He knew the pulse was stuttering, hot blood coursing in trembling veins.
“Does a body make a person alive?” Venti murmured.
His nose then pressed against the underside of Xiao’s jaw. The faint scent of copper and qingxin washed over him as he closed his eyes. He has been pondering an awful lot lately. Maybe it was part and parcel of being a bard, maybe it was just Venti, maybe it was the erosion acting up again, maybe—
“Is my karma affecting you?” Xiao’s voice was firmer, more questioning, but the last syllable echoed like a plea carried off into the wind.
“No,” he murmured, chuckling softly. A small peck was placed at the tender spot behind Xiao’s ear, “Never. This ache is… my own.” He leant back just enough to meet Xiao’s gaze again. The light in his eyes dimmed. The campfire still snapped and sparked, still burning.
Xiao knew that look all too well.
“You think your karma can harm me?” He tilted his head, arms hooked onto Xiao’s neck for support. A teasing laugh left his throat, but sharpening at the edge, “I’ve weathered storms older than Liyue itself, Alatus. I’ve been the storms.”
His voice was as tense as thunder—melancholic, rusting. It has always been more felt than heard. Xiao couldn’t help but roughly retort. “Then why are you asking pointless questions?” The grip of Venti’s torso tightened, pulling him closer. Xiao was still completely ignored.
“Can one love if one does not own a heart?”
Xiao took a measured breath. Impatience threatened to drive him over the edge, but he was better than emotion. His answer came not as a sound, but as a motion. Fingers found their way to cup Venti’s chin, tilting it up carefully. To speak to the winds is to speak what the winds could understand. That was one thing Xiao had learnt.
“Love,” he started, the word already sour on his tongue, burning him—scalding, but he continued evenly, “is not a feeling. It is nothing but an ache, isn’t it?”
Venti faltered, lashes fluttering. Xiao’s voice seeped into his bones. He wanted to laugh, to tease, to begin another poetic line of winds and storms and how hearts though broken but could still sing. The pause after that was not calming. It was thick. Dense. Alive. A bitter lump clogged his throat. Venti’s eyes watered.
Does he need a heart to feel? Does he need a body to ache?
Was he even alive?
Xiao froze. “Please. Don’t—don’t cry.” He said, almost shaky. A hand deliberately moved up—up—up the column of Venti’s spine, praying it would soothe rather than suffocate. In between his brows was creased with worry as he gently petted the tops of the other’s head, massaging the scalp with a tenderness he was surprised he possessed.
Venti never cries. Even at his worst. Even at his lowest. Venti is strong in a way that is often overlooked.
“I am not made of bones and flesh. I was made to last. I was supposed to endure.” He rambled, slipping into the daze. “I was made from winds and prayers. I was not born. I was created. I—I’m—I’m nothing but a husk, am I?” Venti shook under the meaning of his own words. The confession he has dearly tried to ignore. He was not drunk enough for this. He needed—Venti needed…
His arm reached, fingers curling around the neck of a bottle, beside the tree they were leaning against. Cold glass touched his skin. Fire gave the bottles a tempting shine, the liquid sloshed as he picked it up. Sweet. Silly. He needed—Venti needed …
Something to numb. Something to forget. Something to fill the cracks that were no longer smoothened by smiles and song. A whiff of wine, a taste of dandelions, calming his unrest. But when the bottle was half-way to his lips, Xiao’s gloved hand stopped him quietly.
“Don’t,” Xiao said softly “not tonight.”
Venti abruptly hardened, short-circuiting. Seaweed eyes suddenly flashed a hot crimson, then narrowed into slits. The corner of his lips twitched to a sick smile.
"What did you say?"
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to.
Xiao didn’t flinch.
Venti’s smile sliced his cheeks like a blade. Doe saltwater eyes spun to piercing ruby. He attempted to pry the alcohol out of Venti’s grasp, but those fingers only tightened, that smile only widened unnaturally, too. A taut coil ready to pounce.
Xiao didn’t flinch. He swore he did not, for Xiao was not afraid of his lover. He didn’t. He didn’t. He didn’t.
There was a switch in Venti’s tone, from warm and rich to menacing. A loss of control shimmered those now raging eyes. He held his ground, hand finding their way to grip Venti’s wrist. He could not hurt Venti, neither because Venti could not be hurt nor because he could be killed within another blink of an eye, but because he could not bear to. Xiao was pathetic like that.
“I said,” he repeated, sucking in a deep breath, an invitation for challenge, “not tonight.”
Xiao was going to die.
Love brings out the stupidest in people.
Venti stared at him, long and hard. Contemplative. A puppet locked in pose, mid-performance, with fraying strings that barely hung onto the body. That grin, too stretched to be real, twitching like the deterioration of a mask. His free hand dug into the back of Xiao’s neck, a nail resting above his pulse, razor sharp tip pressing in. Then—
Then he laughed.
It wasn’t the kind that danced and swung in the air whenever they held each other as close as this, not with the warmth that reverberated on Xiao’s skin. It was hollow. Unraveling. A jagged, brittle thing that scratched and shattered like cold broken glass. And just as quickly, it died, choked out and spread into the wind.
“...You’re lucky that I like you,” Venti whispered, still smiling, still haunting. The bottle slipped from his clutch, dropping onto the grass with a soft thud. It rolled astray. He leaned forward, forehead bumping against Xiao’s.
Close enough for Xiao to see his own petrified expression. He was not afraid. Or he wasn’t supposed to.
Venti had warned him, times other than this. Xiao had ignored it.
“I could unmake the skies, you know,” he murmured, closing in. Their gazes intertwined. “Rip the stars out, paint the moon in her own blood.”
Their breaths mixed.
“But I won’t,” Venti’s arm wrapped around his neck tighter. His voice was dangerously low. “Because. You. Asked,” Venti emphasized each word, “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
The campfire crackled once more, as it always did, but more gently this time. The flames had learnt to fear the winds’ silence.
Xiao did not dare to breathe. His forehead was still pressed against Venti’s, their skin touching, Venti’s lips just grazing above his, yet the distance between them felt like it spanned eons. Though Xiao had seen it all, faced it all—been it all .
“I know what you are,” Xiao said.
“I am nothing,” Venti replied, with so much conviction it had almost convinced them both. It was followed by a honeyed chuckle.
“No,” Xiao said again, hands pushing Venti’s shoulders further away so he could see the bard in his entirety. “You are…. everything.”
He didn’t say it to be affectionate.
He said it because it was a truth.
A terrible truth.
Venti kissed him. It stole the breath out of his lungs—messy, aching, too rushed to be anything but pure desperation. Like floods and tides and storms that drowned ships that swallowed villages. His lips tasted like mint and apples, nauseatingly sweet and quietly rotting by the centuries.
Xiao kissed back, not because he was certain. But because he was not. Because Venti wasn’t easy, because Venti had never been easy even though Venti tried to be, and Xiao knew he tried. Xiao ached for him anyway. Because love in its essence was pain. And there was nothing hurting him more than this. Not even karma. His head spun.
The kiss came and ended unresolved, a thread pulled taut between two mouths. When they broke apart, there was no soft pop of noise.
Venti’s eyes were still cloudy and discolored against the flickering firelight. Lips trying to smile, but barely held into shape, lopsided and forced. This is how he would crack.
He suddenly snatched Xiao’s hand—so tightly his knuckles turned white. Xiao did not retaliate, though the faint memory of his polearm hovered in his free hand like a phantom, waiting for a call.
Venti brought Xiao’s hand to his mouth, took the end of a gloved finger in between his teeth, and tugged it off. He then placed the bare hand where his heart should be, under green fabric of a cape and white blouse. There was no thump—thump—thump of life, no pulse, no heart.
It was cold. Lifeless. Non-being.
Crack Venti did. Not in rage. Not in war. Not even in the most deafening silence of the seven heavens, but in his own quiet surrender.
“I am not made of bones and flesh, Alatus. I have no heart to give, no blood to prove my ache. Cut me, tear me, rip me into shreds. I'm nothing but a concept. A concept with a mind that made itself a body to reside. I am freedom, I am winds, and that is what I will be, and all I shall ever be.”
Xiao's eyes drifted to his hand, still held against Venti’s chest. There was nothing there—he didn’t have to remind himself—no rhythm, no beat, not a flutter nor mortality. Only stillness. Another void that is a man who sang and drank as if he didn’t have endless tomorrows.
It was unnatural. It was unsettling.
But his palm remained. His eyes glanced up.
Venti dangerously looked as though he was ready to snap. Tips of dark hair seemed as though they were honed to slice, sharp eyes, sharper smile with teeth almost baring challengingly. A tense hand forcibly shoved his deeper into the emptiness, as though proving a point.
A look in now corrupted eyes awaited rejection.
“Who did you fall in love with then? The god, or the bard, Alatus?” His tone was soft, beguiling—tempting. It was nearly desperate. Xiao felt his shoulders stiffened.
Neither was the true answer, was it?
A beat passed. Then another.
“I fell in love with you."
Those shields fell, those walls crumbled. The winds paused mid-flight. Not even the leaves dared to stir.
Venti reeled.
His smirk faltered. A mock, a jest burned on his tongue, but as Venti’s mouth opened he did not find the air to speak. Nothing came. Before he knew it he was bare. There was nothing else to hide behind no more.
Each point of contact that Xiao made with his skin felt like layers peeling with every second that passed. For the first time in a very long time, Venti was struck breathless.
“Liar.” Venti whispered, voice broken too. His arms uncurled around Xiao’s neck, legs shifting off of Xiao’s lap. “You’re such a liar .”
It lacked bite. Though it ached all the same.
Xiao refrained from coaxing the other back into his arms. Just a bit longer. Venti would unravel, he would shatter, and Xiao couldn’t hold him together if they weren’t close together. The distance between them lengthened tenfold.
“Venti—” Xiao reached out, the firm, unyielding tone he carried lost.
The bard scooted even further away, eyes manic. “Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar.”
A powerful gust of winds swept through the clearing. The campfire chuffed, ash flew as the fire died in its wake. The trees shook and quiver. Xiao’s hair blew. Venti’s braids swung and slashed, and they were not glowing like any other Archon’s would.
Barely close to a fraction of his full power.
When eyes turned to knives and winds screamed, the very air that weaved his life now bent to a storm by the hands of his own lover, Xiao wondered how he could be this hopelessly smitten, hopelessly ached for a soul who indirectly declared they cannot love him in the way that most consider love.
Xiao did not care what most people thought.
He stood under the watching eyes of a storm, watched it take form, watched Venti slowly cracking with millennia of rust and erosion. Winds blew harsher, whipping his face. But Venti was not trying to hurt Xiao.
He was trying to be hurt by him.
To be proven right—that me was untouchable, unattainable, unlovable. That no one, not even Xiao, could love a thing that wasn’t truly tangible.
“Maybe I am,” Xiao admitted, without further hesitation, “A liar I may be, a coward, a fool.”
He paused, mulling over his words carefully. “But I don’t lie about this. I would never. Not tonight.”
The gales did not stop. It hissed colder, slashing like ropes and coils, howling . He wondered if Venti had truly heard him, or had heard the unspoken prayer. But to speak to Venti is to speak to what the winds could understand.
The winds kicked and cried. But even in their wrath, they listened.
Xiao sat forward, leaning closer to the body that clutched the ground and grass. A gust lashed Xiao’s cheek like a whip, but he did not complain. Venti watched as he crept closer, barely human in that moment–wind incarnate, wrath incarnate. His figure trembled not with weakness, but the unbearable weight of being. Of emptiness beneath a thousand names, a thousand songs sung in voices not truly his own.
And yet Xiao walked into the storm.
Because it was Venti. For all his faces, his chaos and cacophony, was still Venti. He fell for the god, the bard, the being, the soul . He held them closer to his heart than he will ever know. Xiao’s hand extended. The wind slashed at his skin still, but he didn’t blink. His eyes—his eyes begged.
See me. Watch me. Choose to stay.
Venti stared, trembling, unbreathing. He could not move, could not run, not when the storm was himself. Not when the storm was all that was left. The winds listened in. They howled in protest. They shivered in denial. But they did not retreat.
Venti stood up, a figure carved from the tempest—cracked porcelain held together by pride and his own stubbornness. His hair spiraling madly, arms wrapped around his torso, as if trying to comfort himself, jaw clenched. His voice came next, raw, guttural, spilling through gritted teeth.
“You say it now,” he spat, the air recoiling with his words, “But I’ve been forgotten before. Cast aside. Abandoned. I know what love looks like. It fades. It falters. Even gods fall victim to mortal hearts. Even winds are left behind.”
He didn’t notice it. How his voice was cracking too. How it rose in pitched, quivering at the end of each syllable. How his hand were shaking around his waist. How he’d backed away so far the space between them wasn’t just physical now, but palpable.
“Tell me, Alatus,” Venti hissed, “When you no longer feel me, when I fade into mist and song and nothingness again, will you still love the wind?”
Xiao crossed the space between them slowly, each step a declaration. The winds tugged at his hair, scratched at his face, but he did not stop. Not even when it roared like a beast. Not even when it screamed stay away in a voice and sounded eerily like Venti’s
He stepped right into it. Into him.
And the wind stuttered.
“Don’t look at me like that!” Venti yelled over the wails of his storm, turning away. Xiao felt himself break. He closed the final step and wrapped his arms around the bard from behind. Firmly, Unshakably. The motion caught a violent jolt from Venti’s body—like lightning thrashing in the air. He pressed his head in between Venti’s shoulder blades, fingers curling around his waist again.
“I don’t seem to understand what you mean.” He whispered, knowing full well Venti could hear him.
“Stop looking at me like—like,” Venti’s hands fisted into knots, quivering, “Stop looking at me like I’m something worth it.”
“..You are, though,” Xiao said, voice muffled into Venti’s back, yet brimming with clarity. “You are worth it, Venti. I will always look at you like this.”
The bard hiccupped, form shaking with each, but Xiao still held on. He cannot afford to let go.
“No, I’m not,” he muttered, a rasp tearing through his throat, hoarse and paper thin. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to be loved like this. I don’t want you to chase something you can’t keep. I don’t want to waste your time trying to love something that is not.”
“You are. You feel. You ache. You love. You love me. You love me even without a body, without a heart. You said so. I believe you. I do not need you to be flesh. Or bone. Or blood. Or a heart beating in rhythm to mind. You are wind and song and grief and joy—”
He turned Venti to face him gently, standing up, brushing strands of wild dark wild away from the bard’s cheek.
“—and I’ve felt more alive beside you than I have spent centuries.”
Venti looked at him, really looked. The rage wasn’t gone–but it had quieted. Red eyes dulling, curled in on itself. Xiao met him with unblinking, unguarded reverence. The wind gave one final, sharp cry. Then went still.
“You say that now,”
“Then let me say it tomorrow,” Xiao replied, without pause. “And the next. And the day after. For as many tomorrows as you will allow me.”
Venti stared. He had sung to gods and men, brought many to their knees with lullabies and laments, had held mortals in his hands like sand in an hourglass. And yet here—here in this clearing where time had stilled—he forgot how to breathe.
“You can’t promise forever,” Venti said, eyes fluttering shut.
“I’m not,” Xiao replied, “I’m promising now.”
Silence again. But this one felt… easier. Not peace, not quiet, but something akin to it. The kind that came after a storm, with twisted branches and soaked soil and aching bones that still somehow remembered how to stand.
The fire had been snuffed, ash catching the faint light of the now clear moon. The stars now peeked out from behind the louds, cautious, as though fearing what might happen next.
When the bard finally spoke again, it was barely more than a breath.
“Xiao..”
“Yes?”
“Tell me that lie again, please?”
“It was not a lie though.”
“Just tell me.”
“I love you.”
“More.”
Xiao chuckled. “I love you. I love you. And I always will, Venti.”
Not long after, the bard fainted from the emotional toll. His head rested against Xiao’s shoulder. The yaksha sighed. With practiced care, he gathered Venti in his arms, guiding Venti’s legs around his waist, before lifting him. One step at a time, he carried the bard down the pathway, toward hopefully a warm bed at Wangshu Inn.