Chapter Text
The snow is falling from the wrong direction.
That was Diluc's last thought before the world tilted askew, fading to a pleasant blackness.
The cold still finds him in unconsciousness, the way it bites at his cheek at the wrong angle, needling and unrelenting. He curses Snezhnaya, not for the first time, and its wretched weather.
Something wet clings under his nails. Blood, probably. He can feel it drying. His side throbs, sluggish pulses seeping through fabric just above his hip. His? Somebody else's? It's getting increasingly harder to tell. Harder yet to care. The sensation is a familiar one either way.
The cold only steals the rest.
Then, blissfully, there is nothing.
The weightlessness finds him later. An arm beneath his knees, the other supporting his shoulders, lifting him out of the snow and towards…hopefully somewhere less dire than this. Dead men shouldn't feel as though they are being carried, he reasons, but logic is but a flimsy shield against humiliation.
Ice-shieldwall mitachurl, his mind provides. He can picture it clearly: the beast dragging him off to some frozen den, mounting him like a trophy on a cavern wall. The indignity of it almost resurrects him. Almost.
He almost wishes the thing had killed him outright. At least then, he could haunt the damn thing out of sheer principle. But, oh, what an opus of disgrace that would be — Diluc Ragnvindr, felled by a club and an icy shield. In Snezhnaya of all places.
Only… mitachurls aren't known for their eloquent speech, and the words spoken into his hair are warm, inexorably human. The cadence alone is enough to spark his nerves with offended awareness. He can't parse them, his consciousness still fog-thick, but they lull him back into that blissful nothingness all the same.
And then it stays like that for some time.
Not dead then.
He surfaces slowly, his senses coming to in pieces, one by one. The jagged edge of stone grates at his back. There's a fire crackling nearby, somewhere to his… left? He smells it before he feels it, and he feels it before he sees it.
For a beat, he feels like sinking back into slumber. Adelinde used to scold him for trying to wring five more minutes out of her. By the time he was well on his way towards adulthood, he never quite had the wherewithal to let himself idle. But here, there is nobody to judge him if he were to just…
Only, who started the fire?
His eyes peel open to the jarring orange flicker of it, the wind trying valiantly to douse it from the mouth of the… he's in a cave? And to a stranger's silhouette kneeling by the blaze, turning a roasted gull over in the heat. Diluc squints, though his vision blackens at the edges as he tries to sit up. The coat draped over his lap is welcome until it isn't — dense with meltwater and just heavy enough that he has to grunt against it to get himself upright.
The silhouette turns to him, then. Wide blue eyes that crinkle with the force of his smile.
He knows those eyes by infamy rather than acquaintance. The unmistakable unnervingly-keen gaze of the Eleventh Harbinger. Childe. Tartaglia. Whatever name the man is wearing today.
Nefer had warned him to steer clear of this one. ‘He's unpredictable,’ she had said. ‘Power drunk. Unstable.’
A quick glance up at that mask affixed to his hair — blood-red, unequivocally Fatui — and his heart plummets into his stomach.
“Oh, hey. You're awake,” Childe—Tartaglia… the wretched Harbinger says, voice easy, as if any of this is normal. Like he didn't just carry Diluc's corpse-adjacent body out of a blizzard. As though Diluc isn't a wanted criminal in these lands. “Hungry?”
Diluc's glare forms on instinct. His fingers flex by his side, expecting to curl around the hilt of a claymore. But it's fruitless. He reaches beneath the coat-blanket to adjust his glove, only to find—
“I took that off when I got you settled.” That voice is truly grating. Far too amicable. “You'll get it back. I'm not in the business of taking that which has clearly bonded with you.”
Like struck flint, Diluc feels the fire between his ribs roar to life. So much loathing and nowhere to put it. Diluc's nails bite into his bare palm to stave it.
“Worry not, comrade,” Childe adds, giving the roasted gull one more spin on the spit, before turning away to plate it up. “If I wanted you disarmed, I would have left you out there. I certainly wouldn't be making you dinner. Killed this myself, by the way. It's not much but… well, things don't tend to survive long enough to be hunted in the wilderness this far north.”
“I'd sooner freeze than accept anything from you,” Diluc all but spits. His voice sounds rough, even to his own ears.
Childe only laughs, a soft puff of sound, and finishes carving meat from bones. “Well, I can't exactly say that I feel sorry for saving your life. Warrior to warrior? It would have been a pathetic death.”
“You didn't have to save me.” It's a concession, not a thanks.
“Mm, either way.” Childe's idea of a plate looks to be a torn-off strip of his scarf. It matches the bandages wound haphazardly around his leg and middle, and that gives Diluc pause.
He hadn't seen anybody else out there. Childe kneels before him, and this close, Diluc registers pale skin, a soft smattering of freckles, ridiculously long lashes. His smile is bright enough to be abrasive.
Hard to miss someone like that, even without Diluc's keen eye.
Still, the meat rouses his own stomach, and he's only somewhat grateful for Childe's apparent ignorance at the guttural sound of his hunger.
How long has it been? Four— five days without food? Time means very little.
“I didn't poison it, if that's what you're worried about.” He gets an eyeful of the inside of Childe's mouth as he takes an exaggerated bite, chewing obnoxiously before swallowing loudly. Archons, Diluc wants to kill him. “See?”
Food first, Diluc reasons. He can regain his energy. Steal back his Delusion. Put his blade through the Harbinger's chest.
“I wasn't worried.” He's heard enough about the Eleventh Harbinger to know his thirst for a good battle. Diluc is very much the same. Since his first foray into the north, his subsequent respite in Nod Krai, and now, again, here, he finds himself increasingly amenable for the blood on his hands.
Childe eyes him for a long moment, that damned smile never faltering, before shrugging, boldly taking a seat a foot or so beside him. “So, Diluc Ragnvindr, isn't it? I've been dying to meet you in person. You've killed thousands of my comrades, no?”
“That's a gross over-estimation.”
“Oh, no need to be so modest.” Childe leans in, just an inch. “Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed. More so, that you're able to wield a Delusion — not one of those off-market models either. But your self-preservation skills could use some work.”
“My self-preservation skills are nobody's business but my own,” Diluc grits out, and shoots Childe a glare for good measure. “Surely, it would please your precious Archon to see me fall to the elements.”
A strange darkness falls over Childe's expression. His smile doesn't falter, but it twists into something Diluc can't decipher, but puts him on edge all the same.
The last thing he needs is to stoke a Harbinger's anger, especially in this state. His self-preservation may be up for question, but he still has a goal to carry out.
Childe looks away first, attention turning back to his food, and it feels like a small victory. The tension dissipates as quickly as it had appeared, the ensuing silence manageable, if not preferable. Not so uncomfortable that it ruins his ravenous appetite, but just loaded enough that he feels the exact moment Childe decides to open his mouth again.
“So, I suppose I don't need to ask you what brought you to Snezhnaya.” He's quieter now. Subdued. Like a scholar tiptoeing around a Hilichurl camp, trying to understand, to communicate. His smile is different — less teeth, more a lopsided tick of his mouth. “But this far north? Comrade, whatever it is you're looking for, you won't find it here.”
“I am not your comrade,” Diluc bristles around a mouthful of gull. His own bandages are uncomfortable; loose threads catch in the tack of his wounds, which only serves to irritate him further. “I know exactly where I am going, thank you very much.”
Childe's brows tick upwards, and he seems genuinely interested, knees pulled to his chest, leaning closer as though receiving a secret. But Diluc isn't interested in reciting his itinerary — not to him. But while the fire warms one half of his face, the Harbinger warms the other with his tedious insistence.
“Why did you save me?” It's a safe diversion, but Diluc is much too tired for jovialties. “If not to hand me in to the Tsaritsa, then what?”
Childe leans back against the wall, stretching his legs out lazily. The wince he tries — and fails — to hide pulls at Diluc's attention. He forgets sometimes that even Harbingers bleed.
“You were dying.” The performative lilt is gone now. No flourish. No goading. “I happened to be there. That's all.”
Diluc scoffs, because ‘that's all’ is never all. “Convenient.”
Childe's shoulders lift in a half-shrug. “Like I said, it would have been a pathetic death.” He smiles ruefully. “Not to mention, it would be a real shame to let you slip before I even get a chance to fight you. I've been dying to meet you for ages now, Diluc Ragnvindr.”
Of course. Battle first, mercy second. The man's reputation truly does precede him.
“And like I said, I have somewhere to be. You are not my concern. But should you get in my way, I won't hesitate to—”
“Kill me?” Diluc's jaw tenses. He hates that this— this menace looks at him like that. So earnest. So empathetic. As if he knows how Diluc feels. As if he and his ilk know anything but destruction. “No offense, Lord Ragnvindr, but you're hardly fit to travel, never mind engage in combat.”
“Don't call me that.”
“What? Lord Ragnvindr?” He's lightly jostled by the infuriatingly companionable nudge of Childe's elbow. “Can't call you that. Can't call you comrade. My options are thinning out by the minute. So what should I call you?”
With a long-suffering sigh, Diluc sets aside his empty scarf-plate, tipping his head back against the wall. “Diluc is fine.”
“Okay, Diluc. Then where is it that you need to go? Maybe I can escort you there. Then, once you're recovered, we can cross blades?”
There's a boyish nature to him. A soft, human shape to his smile. Diluc can't quite reconcile it with the tales of the Eleventh Harbinger.
Still, he regrets answering the moment he opens his mouth. Hates that it comes easily anyway, in lieu of his own exhaustion. “I was informed of a small fishing town in the far north, outside of the Fatui's sphere of influence. A safe place to rest.”
“Morepesok,” Childe answers. Then he bursts into peels of laughter, a bright and painfully alive sound that echoes oddly through the sombre cave. “That's my hometown! Small world, huh? Of all the places—”
Not for the first time — and it certainly won't be the last — Diluc silently begs the gods for a meteor. Preferably aimed at this cave.
“...You're joking.”
This time, Childe's foot nudges into his boot. He's still smiling, albeit gentler now. Sympathetic, perhaps. “Do you want me to lie?”
The irony feels like a punchline Diluc never asked for. Indeed, the world is awfully small.
“Anyway, how about this:” Childe continues, casually as if he were discussing the weather. “The offer to escort you still stands—”
“Absolutely not,” Diluc growls, shoving Childe's foot away with his own.
“Hey, hear me out, okay? I escort you to Morepesok. You stay long enough to taste my ma's healing borscht. I promise, it'll warm you from the inside. Then, I'll let you leave, trusting that our paths will cross again someday — and thus, so will our blades.”
“And why would I do that?” His gaze narrows. No sane person would invite a complete stranger to their family home, no less someone like Diluc. Someone who is the scourge to Fatui encampments everywhere.
Childe huffs a laugh through his nose, tipping his head back against stone. The fire gilds him. If he didn't know better, he'd think Childe looked human. “Maybe because nobody else is offering? I don't know. But it certainly beats roaming around aimlessly in the snow, doesn't it? Who knows what kinds of monsters come out at night?”
Diluc will neither confirm nor deny that. He hums, a noncommittal sound of finality, and turns his attention to his own injuries.
At some point while he was unconscious, Childe must have patched him up — must have used the last of his medical supplies on Diluc, because there's not a single scrap of scarf wound around him.
He peels back bandages and gauze to inspect his most bothersome wound. A mitachurl had speared its ice-sharp shield into Diluc's side, just below his ribcage. And Diluc, shamefully weak and malnourished, had allowed it.
Pathetic. Pathetic to stumble at that hurdle, when Zapolyarny Palace still stands.
The gash is weeping, blood and plasma oozing steadily, soiling the dressing, seeping through to his undershirt. It's been hastily stitched closed, the needlework of shaking hands.
The thought is…troubling.
“You think too loud.” He pulls his gaze from the far edge of the wall to find Childe looking at him again. Unnervingly, yes. But soft. Genuinely concerned. “You're going to wear yourself out. Right now, you're running on malice and a measly seabird. I didn't patch you up for you to scowl your way into an early grave.”
Diluc's glare could sear steel. “You overestimate your own usefulness.”
“Mm. Maybe.” Childe tries to stretch his legs out again, the heels of his boots skidding over gravel. Then, he pauses. Diluc's line of sight falls to his clenched fist, the way he presses down on his thigh. There's a tension in his jaw that belies his easy grin. “Somebody had to drag your stubborn ass out of the snow though, before you became a permanent landmark.”
The insult is familiar. The concern beneath it is not. Diluc blinks, forcing his shoulders to slump. There's no point debating his mortality here.
Still, the following silence is a welcome reprieve. Perhaps it's his long-ingrained training with the Knights of Favonius coming into play, but Diluc can't help noticing every minute movement, the way the Harbinger favours his left side. The way that he shifts, and then shifts again.
Strangely, the cave is warm now. The fire crackles, stubbornly burning despite the screaming of the storm outside. If the wind were to change direction, they'd surely freeze. It's a risk they're taking anyway, because it's the only choice they have — because the alternative is imminent death.
Diluc stirs from his sluggish half-tired half-alert state, testing the ache in his side. A slow, miserable protest of injury. “...What if I refuse your escort?”
Childe blinks at him, then returns to stoking the fire with the flimsy end of a dry twig.
“Then you crawl, I would suppose.” His voice screams nonchalance, though the tick of his jaw betrays him. “Very heroic of the illustrious Diluc Ragnvindr. And very slow.”
Diluc clicks his tongue. “I am more than capable of travelling alone.”
“Uh-huh.” Childe glances over his shoulder, finally smirking again, that lopsided, boyish tilt of his mouth. “Evidently.”
The last thing Diluc needs is an international incident on his conscience. Taking out Fatui camps is one thing, but to take down a Harbinger? That would surely put Mondstadt in a great deal of danger.
But temptation is an ever-gnawing thing.
He doesn't dignify it with a response, instead pulling Childe's coat tighter around himself as though strangling the thing on principle.
The wind does blow awry then, sending a short flurry of snow into the mouth of the cave. Diluc's first instinct is to shift away from it, and he finds himself arm to arm with Childe, who blinks owlishly in turn. He looks to come to his senses a few moments later, shimmying deeper into the alcove's belly to grant Diluc a few inches of breathing space.
“You're injured.” Diluc hears himself mutter, then immediately curses himself for letting concern bleed through.
Childe pauses, and even that is jarring. When he sits still for long enough to be seen is when he becomes starkly human. His pink-tipped nose is dusted with a faint smattering of freckles, and his mouth sits slightly lopsided when he smiles.
He's endearing, in a way. Which makes him all the more dangerous.
But then he's laughing, bright and unrestrained, putting a flimsy mask over his pain, and Diluc remembers to hate him.
“Very astute,” says Childe. “Congratulations.”
Diluc bristles, heat rising up his neck. “You're not exactly subtle.”
Childe casts him a lazy sideways glance, but the residual trace of his smile doesn't quite reach his eyes. “I wasn't exactly trying to be.”
Silence stretches again, and Diluc lets it. He can think of a thousand rebuttals, not least of which taking a shallow dig at Childe's position; his rank or his strength or his ridiculous proclivity towards granting grace to the enemies of his people.
It all falls short though. There's nothing Diluc could say that wouldn't reflect just as badly on him.
The storm is still shrieking outside their little bubble, but it feels farther away now. Moving east, by the sound of it. Perhaps Barbatos himself is summoning the wind back to Mond, to power the mills ahead of some gaudy procession for the Knights of Favonius. The thought doesn't comfort him like it used to.
Childe speaks without looking at him, yanking him back to the here and now. “If you're worried, don't be. We Snezhnayans are resilient by nature. If you can survive a Snezhnayan winter, you can survive anything. That's what my babushka always used to say.”
I'm not worried, is what Diluc should say. He knows he should. But the words lodge somewhere in the back of his throat; the unsolicited tidbit about Childe's grandmother settles somewhere unbidden, like snow collecting in the hollow of his ribcage.
He doesn't want wisdom from ancestors, or borscht, or kindness from a Fatui Harbinger, whose smile jolts like dawn breaking over ice.
And yet his chest aches. This gods-awful gash in his side is throbbing, and he'd give anything to spend one night in a bed, with a pillow and a blanket, and a place to properly clean his wounds. His body is pleading its case in an argument he is rapidly losing.
He exhales a slow breath through his nose. “Your babushka probably didn't insinuate that you should be spending Snezhnayan winters outdoors.”
“Hah! Pot—” Childe gestures towards Diluc, and then to himself. Diluc rolls his eyes. “—Kettle.”
A fresh chill seeps in as Diluc shifts, eager for proximity, and he immediately mourns the warmth. Having eaten, he's certainly better attuned to his body. So when Childe's arm presses against his own once more, he tells himself that the ensuing heat is borne of anger, forcibly suppressed.
“You and I are nothing alike,” he hisses from between gritted teeth, ignoring the acrid taste of bile on his tongue at the belated realisation that they're two sides of the same coin. Blood stains both of their hands. For all the ways the Eleventh Harbinger is a monster, it's nothing Diluc hasn't called himself.
Childe freezes — and Diluc really wishes he would stop doing that. Motion suits him better. Unpredictability. Danger. Stillness makes him real. Stillness makes him someone he could have just as easily met in a tavern.
“Oof,” says Childe at last. “Harsh crowd.”
“You deserve harsher.”
“I probably do.” He seems to agree with this much. But still, he almost sounds…resigned? As if Diluc would ever see him as anything but the despicable fiend that he is. “I'm still not going to apologise for saving your life though.”
“Unrepentant.”
“Ungrateful.”
The banked embers of the fight are rapidly dying out. Diluc has — had — a brother. He should know better than to be petulant for petulant's sake.
“Ungrateful that the scourge of my existence is looking me in the face? Yes.”
“Ohhh.” Childe sways into his side, delighted like a man being handed a loaded gun. “So I'm the scourge of your existence? Funny. I wasn't aware we'd crossed paths before tonight.”
“That's— you're all the same.”
He laughs again, loud and warm, and it rings through the hollow of the cave. “Are you done?”
Archons, it really is like bickering with Kaeya, aged fourteen, over something as menial as who pushed who into the grape trellises at the winery first while play-sparring.
He folds his arms across his chest and scowls heavensward, and the irony isn't lost on him. He's the one clutching at air for a flimsy excuse to maintain the high ground, when they're both about as low as it gets. Injured and cold and tired and trapped.
“For now.”
“Good.” He risks a glance, and finds Childe gazing back at him, brows raised in what could pass for concern. It's a truce, albeit temporary, and Diluc doesn't have the wherewithal to fight it. “Because you need to conserve your energy. The storm's moving out. I reckon we'll be stuck here until morning.”
Of course.
“What joy,” he mutters, but there's no bite to it. He'll concede if it gets them through the night. It's the only excuse he's got left to cling to.
“And then,” Childe continues, shifting ever so slightly closer — subtle movements that contain all the air of a man trying not to startle a cornered animal, “We set off to Morepesok at dawn.”
With a grudging huff through his nose, Diluc lifts the edge of Childe's coat, and chooses not to gripe when the solidity of another body deflates against his side. He pointedly does not think about how welcome the warmth is.
“I never agreed to accept your escort.”
“Mm. You didn't have to.”
Childe settles easily, after shifting briefly for comfort. But once he calms down, so, too, do Diluc's nerves. Much like time, sleep is elusive, but he can feel the pull of it blurring the edge of his vision.
How long has he been in the north now? One, two…three years? The last time he slept beside another warm body must have been back when he and Kaeya were much younger, fretting about gale force winds and rapturous thunderstorms. Incidentally, those were always the most peaceful nights of his life.
This is not dissimilar in concept.
Childe turns his head, slow and lazy, and it's startling just how…regular he looks up close.
“Get some sleep, Diluc,” he continues, “You'll need it. My ma's borscht is legendary, and so is her hospitality. Someone like you? You will be adored relentlessly, whether you want it or not. My youngest brother, Teucer… he's gonna think you're a fairy tale prince. He'll worship the ground you walk on if you tell him anything about dragons.”
Once he gets started, he's hard pressed to stop — something Diluc doesn't have the energy for, but listens to nevertheless.
There's still that lilt to Childe's mouth, an inexorable pride about him when he speaks of family. It settles uncomfortably in the pit of Diluc's stomach. Because for all the evil this man represents, he still has a family. A family whom he loves; a brother he clearly hasn't tried to kill.
So what does that make Diluc?
“You said you were escorting me to Morepesok,” he mutters, letting his gaze flit absently to the pitch black of outside. “You mentioned your mother's borscht once. You said nothing about parading me in front of your family.”
“But it makes sense, does it not? My family… They're good people. They're not huge on the Fatui either. Hell, Teucer doesn't even know what I do. He thinks I sell toys for a living.”
That much draws out an involuntary huff of breath. Less so for how preposterous it is than just how clearly Diluc can see it, against his better judgement. Tartaglia the toyseller, with his wide earnest eyes and his boyish smile.
It's ridiculous. Outlandish. But not unbefitting.
“Fine. Whatever. I'm too tired to argue this further.”
For a moment, he could swear he felt Childe slump in relief. But it's soon marred by another of those infuriating nudges of companionship that pulls his wounds and grates to the marrow.
“I already told you.” Childe's breath puffs warm against the side of his head. “Get some rest. I won't stab you in your sleep, if you're worried.”
He's not. He's already been saved once. He trusts in that, if nothing else. He hums noncommittally, and turns his focus to the hair at the edge of his consciousness as it begins to tug him under.
“Perhaps if you shut up for more than two minutes,” Diluc grumbles indignantly, turning his face away, “then I might finally be able to get some rest.”
He expects a laugh for that, something loud and boisterous. What he gets instead is soft, low and controlled. Less thunder, more ember. “Wounding words for a man whose life I saved tonight.”
“Archons preserve me…”
“You don't need them. I already did that. Not to mention, I'm warm, I'm unarmed, and I made you dinner. That counts for a lot in the north.”
“Harbinger.”
Childe just smiles, shadow-soft. He already sounds close to sleep when he deigns to open his mouth again. “See you in the morning, Diluc Ragnvindr.”
Diluc closes his eyes. Jaw tight. Pride tattered, but not irreparable. Sleep takes him instantaneously.