Chapter Text
The teacup rattled slightly in Ningguang’s hand. It would be time to wake up soon.
There was a thin layer of dust covering the balcony. The woman sitting across her could have been her sister, maybe even a twin. She had hair curlier and ashier than Ningguang’s, though; more freckles, a warmer smile, and eyes closer to lavender than red.
This was a woman Ningguang had seen before. This was a woman she dreamed of frequently, and who had been with her for a very long time.
“I always hate cutting this short,” said Guizhong. “But there’s somewhere we should be.”
“I know.” Ningguang lowered her teacup. “I can feel it, too.”
It was a shake on the other side, almost a sound if the dream grew quiet enough. Something had gone empty, or been destroyed, or was being dug out. Hard to pinpoint the nature of it from far away. Something was happening.
She always knew when something was happening in Liyue. She had never bothered to ask herself how. The knowing was just there, like a cough waiting to free itself, a breath caught in her chest.
“Seems that they’ve really done it this time,” she murmured.
Guizhong chuckled and shook her head. “Men.”
“Indeed.”
She leaned against the railing. Ningguang stood to join her and for a moment they fell silent, looking out at the harbor.
Guizhong pointed towards one of the cliffs just outside the city, near one of the many stone statues of Morax. Ningguang had asked her, once, why there were no statues of her; she had explained that there were once, but they fell to dust when she did.
That’s...a shame.
Why? I’m still there, you know. You can tell if you stand still enough.
“There.”
“There?”
“Yes. There.” Guizhong nodded firmly. “I left it there.”
Ningguang raised an eyebrow. “Left what?”
Guizhong smiled.
“Get going and you’ll see.”
//
They looked down at the spear Childe still held in one hand, the tip emitting a faint golden light. Childe glanced up at the dragon.
“I guess you won’t be needing this back yet.”
Zhongli blinked slowly and ducked his head, a low rumble rising from somewhere in the back of his throat. He had a lot of things going for him in this form, but opposable thumbs didn’t seem like one of them.
[[NO. I DO NOT BELIEVE I WILL.]]
He flexed long claws, kneaded the rock-hard dirt as if it were no more than sand.
The great yawning hollow at the center of it all had begun shivering violently as soon as the gnosis entered Zhongli’s body. It continued to shake, constructs that weren’t animals swarming around the massive form, seeming as if it might attack him like a volley of white blood cells on an infection. Kept halting halfway, stuttering, not quite building the intent.
Something like confusion, when it recognized what it saw. Childe took a careful step back.
He couldn’t intervene this time. This could only ever be a contract made between two.
Zhongli lowered his head once more, the soft feathers of his crest swaying gently in the wind.
[[IF YOU WILL HAVE ME]]
Whispers flickered all around him. Memories of every time he had touched the empty, and how many times he had come close. Because the emptiness was there, just as ancient as every other memory Morax kept safe. There was nothing more to it, no flash of revelation. Only the quiet certainty of a stone that had always been, was, always would be.
Ajax was what meant the abyss existed in that moment.
Morax was what meant it always had.
Suddenly the war rushed towards them, thousands of years too late to change any of it, the hollow feeling in his chest as he looked out at the writhing battlefield, the hollow feeling that had never quite left, even when the blood stopped flowing, even when he carved something like peace from the aftershock. He had stood, watched, expressionless, wishing desperately to feel something .
He had a very good memory.
The constructs coalesced into a single shape, a dragon that stared at him as if trying to make out its own reflection. Morax looked into the lightless eyes and nodded.
[[YES. ALWAYS.]]
The dragon burst into a rain of glaze lilies, dark and star-covered as every other piece of the abyss. They swirled around him, carried on a dusty breeze, and with the movement came a question that Morax didn’t answer out loud, because he didn’t need to.
“I’m going to kill you.”
Skirk had approached quietly. Almost leisurely. She spoke with no anger, only cold intent, and when Childe looked more closely he could see she was shaking very slightly.
“You want to play like that? I can play like that.”
Something dark was clutched in her hand.
“You’re never going home,” she whispered. “You’re never gonna see them again. Because I’m going to kill you.”
Zhongli growled softly. Skirk threw her head back and laughed, a manic edge creeping into the sound.
“Look at this thing. What a heap of an archon you managed to rig for yourself.”
Childe was rooted to the spot, his eyes fixed on her hand. Felt the cavernous space it took up, even as it took up almost none at all. He felt his chest begin to vibrate slightly, as if it had been struck by a tuning fork. Skirk saw him looking and grinned.
“You like it? I think it was yours, originally. Hard to tell ours apart though. They’re the same, after all.”
She held up the shard, closed her eyes and listened to it sing.
“Felt that whole thing, by the way.” Her eyes went sharp. “It’s so fucking arrogant . It makes me sick. You make me sick.”
The ground began to shake, though Childe couldn’t say which of them was responsible.
“You think you know it?” Skirk hissed. “You think you can understand it? Because you’re--because you’re old ?”
The ground shook harder. Cracks appeared in the surface, filled with the black absence of being.
“You want to talk about ancient? You want to talk about remembering?”
Her lips pulled back in a snarling grin.
“Because I have been down there for a very, very, very long time.”
“Zhongli,” Childe muttered. “Zhongli, get--”
“And I remember every . Fucking. Second. ”
She laughed again. And she laughed. And she kept laughing. And she plunged the shard of Foul Legacy into her heart.
Welcome home.
Across the valley, on the other side of Jueyun Karst, Albedo felt something explode underneath them.
Not the sort of explosion that throws you towards the sky, or the sort that blasts you into pieces too small to reassemble. This blast, rather, took place deep underground, shattered both physical and ethereal foundations of the battle.
Something far beneath had gone to dust. Something important.
He threw up another stone blossom, provoking the pool of fire surrounding Aether into a shield with barely an instant of extra time. He watched the flame fly past his friend’s face and felt responsible for the outcome that could have been, as he always did.
“ Kid !”
Albedo whirled to find Beidou, smashing a reptilitan abyss construct away so fiercely he felt his bones might shatter with the force of it. Her entire body crackled with purple light; her shoulders, her hair, her sword, her eyes. Her eyes, her eyes, her eyes. Something so very wrong with her eyes--
-- no.
He stamped his foot into the ground. The tendrils of dark empty twirled back through, circled him reluctantly.
Nice try, he thought, and he crushed them into crystalline fragments of life the way she had taught him to do, the way everything that tried to make him hurt them ended.
Beidou opened her mouth again, about to speak, but was interrupted by a cyclone of glittering green that swirled the mass of snakes surrounding her so far away they could no longer hold their shape. Aether landed, smiled grimly and unhappily
“We should--”
Abruptly, he fell silent, eyes fixed wide on a spot just beneath the blue-veined tree.
It felt too quiet, then. Too quiet to even call silent, when every breath seemed to echo through empty space for miles, when the movement of pebbles from a shifted weight cascaded loud as a landslide. Aether’s mouth was pressed in a thin line, as though he were trying not to scream.
“Lumine,” he croaked, and he said it out loud, and it hit Albedo like a lance to the chest. “...Lumine?”
Someone stood beneath that tree. Someone small in stature, someone with short light hair, someone with golden eyes that were far, far too familiar.
She took a step back. She took another step back. Her eyes were round, bright, more like a cornered animal than anything human.
you were something
She raised her sword.
we were something
She lowered it.
someone forgot us. someone knew.
She stared at her brother, expressionless.
they knew. they know.
It no longer fooled them. They had spent far too much time with Zhongli. Aether took an unsteady step towards her, and her face went hard.
“Don’t,” she said flatly, and it was then that they saw the glittering dark thing hanging from her belt, the way hummingbirds made of the same material were pulling themselves from the cracked ground at her feet, whirring around her head like a living crown.
Aether made a strange half-motion with the hand that wasn’t holding his sword and Lumine narrowed her eyes before flicking one back at him. It took a few more exchanges before Albedo realized with a jolt that they were talking to each other. He could only catch pieces of the one-handed language they had made together, shorthand that Aether used too frequently to avoid explaining what it meant. Why. Where is. I won’t.
You. Me. Us.
It was mostly for combat, Aether had said. When they only had one hand free each.
Lumine shook her head. This time, when she raised her sword, she didn’t lower it, even when her arm shook.
Aether remained rooted to the spot. He stared at his sister as if she was the only one left in every world that had ever been; maybe, to him, she was.
Slowly the fear drained from his face, replaced by a practiced calm. He straightened up, set his shoulders, raised his own sword--
THWACK.
At first Aether recoiled, seeing only an enemy in the shape that landed on the ground between him and Lumine. But then the head turned, and he saw blue, and he remembered.
“Get out--”
He lowered his hand. Right. Childe wouldn’t understand. “Get out of the way,” he snapped.
Childe said nothing. He looked at Lumine. Lumine’s mouth twitched.
“Aether,” he said. “Do you want to do this?”
“I can do it.”
Slowly, Childe shook his head.
“That doesn’t mean you have to.”
Aether looked as if he had been slapped. There was something fierce in Childe’s chest, something close to regret but far closer to rage. It’s not fair.
“What I am asking,” he said, “is whether or not this is what you want .”
Aether froze, mouth half open, and for the first time since Childe had met him, his sword hand began to shake.
“I don’t want to,” he whispered. “I don’t want to.”
Childe nodded. He glanced up at Lumine, who was watching with raised eyebrows; if he had been an instant faster, he would have seen the half-smile that flickered across her face.
“Okay.”
And then he was gone, shooting towards Lumine with a sharp peal of laughter. She met him halfway with a sudden cackle of her own, and the way they slashed and ducked seemed more like dance than battle, the adoring emptiness ever at their feet, mirroring the fight between Zhongli and Skirk still ongoing at the foot of the cliffs.
Resonating with so many at once had left the abyss more unstable than ever, unable now even to answer consistently to itself with so many wielding it simultaneously. It arced between the four of them like lightning, leaving the air unsteady and charged in its wake. The constructs wavered, disappearing and reappearing halfway across the battlefield, shrinking to almost nothing before ballooning into entirely different shapes ten times larger than what they had been before.
Beidou rolled away from a three-headed snake just in time for it to turn into a boar the size of a house and nearly run her over. She leaped back, cursing, threw a glance towards to Childe to see if he would hear her if she called him a bastard loudly enough.
Maybe, but it wasn’t worth the waste of breath.
With a screech, the construct flickered out of existence. Beidou narrowed her eyes and tensed. It wasn’t gone. She could feel that much.
Another scream, like tearing metal. She looked up and recoiled. The shape was no less familiar for being carved from nothingness.
“Oh, come on!” She slammed her sword into the dirt, sending a cascade of sparks flying into the air. “Haishan? Fucking HAISHAN-- ”
There was no chance to finish, as the shadow of Haishan had vanished in midair. Beidou swore again and whipped around, only to find it crashing towards her from the other side, far too close to dodge in time--she raised her claymore and called up a shield of lightning, knowing even as she did that it wouldn’t be enough, the force of the impact already tearing at her shoulders--
This isn’t good.
BOOM!
A flash of gold tearing through the dark shape, leaving only shimmering dust in its wake. A woman straightening up in the aftermath, glancing back with disdain, flicking her fingers like an afterthought to shoot off gems that blasted away what remained of the construct.
“I thought you said your Harbinger didn’t intend to drop a dead god on the harbor,” said Ningguang. She was holding a catalyst Beidou hadn’t seen before, a shining geometric thing that shifted at her touch.
Beidou grinned sheepishly.
“In my defense.” She held up her hands. “This isn’t technically the harbor.”
“...Right.”
A roar from the direction of Zhongli and Skirk silenced them both. The constructs closest to them were coalescing, rushing together to form two enormous beings that Beidou didn’t recognize.
The dragon’s face made it hard to tell, but it seemed, from the way Zhongli stopped moving, that he knew exactly what they were. Skirk was laughing. The two shapes were taking more defined forms, details pushing into place. A reptilian formed from rocklike shards, a serpentine figure with countless heads, flowing across the ground like water.
“So this is what you’re scared of, huh?” She pointed at him, derisive. “This is all shit you did! Because you wanted to!”
[[ARE YOU TRULY ENOUGH OF A FOOL TO BELIEVE THERE WAS A CHOICE]]
Skirk snorted. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Morax .”
Across the cracked grass, Childe stared, both he and Lumine having frozen in place. He doesn’t sleep , he wanted to say. Stupidly. As if that made a difference.
“The fuck is--”
“Fear,” Ningguang interrupted. “She’s building constructs from his fears.”
Beidou frowned.
“I already knew you were afraid when you fought Haishan,” said Ningguang evenly. “Excuses aren’t necessary.”
“I told you I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you did.” She stepped forward, her eyes still glued to Zhongli. “He was the only thing you ever made a point of telling me you weren’t afraid of.”
Beidou bristled. “You--”
“There is no shame in it, you know. Fear.”
She blinked. She wanted to smack Ningguang’s shoulder, tell her to snap out of it, but something told her this wasn’t Ningguang.
It wasn’t Ningguang at all.
“The truth of it is that your lust for life made your fear into a weapon,” the woman wearing Ningguang’s face said. “It was a weapon that brought down what was effectively a god. You would do well to remember that, Captain.”
The only thing she could think, when she went under, when she couldn’t breathe, when the lightning strike surged through her body and she thought: I don’t want to die , and even though she could feel her muscles going stiff she still kicked towards the creature before her, still grabbed his neck in both hands and pulled--
--and the lightning rushed through her as she pulled, rushed through her and into her enemy, screaming over and over HOW DARE YOU ERASE ME--
-- and then he hadn’t. And they pulled her out of the water, asked her don’t you feel that? when they saw her electrified skin, and she had laughed at them.
I do, she said. That’s the point.
Back in Jueyun Karst, the dragon shook his head. Grief radiated from him like heat off a branding iron, saturating the space until it almost seemed something that could be touched.
“The moment he realized what he was about to do,” murmured not-Ningguang. “That’s what he’s afraid of. He knows it could happen again.”
Beidou eyed her suspiciously. “How would you know that?”
“Because I r--”
For a moment Ningguang looked immensely disoriented. Her eyebrows pinched together as she stared across at Rex Lapis.
“Because I remember,” she said slowly.
The ground shook as Zhongli sat on his haunches, tail curled around his body. He looked down at Skirk with half-lidded eyes.
[[DO YOU THINK ME UNFAMILIAR WITH THE NATURE OF MY FEARS?]]
The rumbling voice didn’t sound angry. It sounded exhausted, and sad.
[[DID YOU HOPE TO FRIGHTEN ME INTO SOME SORT OF SUBMISSION? DID YOU HOPE TO SEE ME COWER LIKE A CHILD?]]
He lowered his head until he was eye level with Skirk.
[[YOU HAVE BEEN ALIVE FOR A LONG TIME, SENTINEL]]
Skirk let out a snarl and the constructs of Azhdaha and Osial burst into motion, descending on Zhongli with a vicious roar.
[[YOU KNOW IT AS WELL AS I DO]]
He raised his eyes and watched them come.
[[THAT THE DEAD GAIN NOTHING FROM WATCHING THE LIVING PARALYZE THEMSELVES WITH MEMORIES]]
Ningguang smiled slightly, struck by a wave of pride that she knew did not belong to her.
He’s come a long way, said the soft voice in the back of her head.
Childe and Lumine had lowered their swords, watching the exchange as if in a trance. Lumine threw him a half-hearted glare, but there was no intention behind it, and when he shook his head she looked angry, but he knew from the way her lips twitched that the anger was directed at herself. She was so very, very similar to her brother.
I don’t want to .
Rex Lapis was a blur of gleaming scales and claws, inky darkness flying in all directions when he tore into the constructs of his old friends. He was firm, he was steady, but he was tired, and he was slowing down, taking as many hits as he landed, black slashes covering his legs and neck.
Do something . Help him .
How? How could he protect Zhongli from his own fears, built from the same material as Childe himself?
She has fears too, you know.
Childe fixed his narrowed eyes on Skirk. How can I find them?
The same way you find anyone else’s, said Bosacius. You look.
He looked at her face. Her eyes. Pale, and desperate. Always desperate. Desperate like she thought it was funny, like her own horrors were nothing more than a good joke she told herself. Fear worked differently for her.
She had been in the abyss for so very long.
She was laughing. He thought of the first time he saw her laugh. He thought of the first time he saw her, towering over him as she leaned on her sword with a grin.
Something different in her eyes the first time he made her bleed. Something new. He remembered, because it was the first time he had laughed down there in the empty.
Ley lines bloomed, releasing tendrils of darkness that twisted impatiently together. Skirk’s head snapped up as she realized, too late, what Ajax was doing.
When he cut into her, just for an instant, there was hope in her eyes.
Skirk stared at the construct. The construct stared back, trembling slightly.
“Oh, you’re fucked up.” She laughed. She took a step back. “You’re so fucked up for this, you know that?”
Of course it would be him. Of course. Of course.
The shadow of fourteen-year-old Ajax charged her; she countered it easily, still laughing. “I meant, if you wanna go that way, we can play. You wanna play, Ajax? Your patchy little god is getting boring.”
He felt it coming before it happened, felt the razor-sharp edge of his terror slide free like a knife being pulled from a wound, fear so intense it could only be born in the heart of a child. Grimly he watched Azhdaha and Osial melt down and reform, knowing exactly what was coming, which didn’t make it any easier. It never made it any easier.
Skirk grinned and leaned on her sword. The shadow of Skirk grinned and leaned on her sword.
“Aw, it’s still me,” they said in unison.
“Go fuck yourself,” snarled Childe.
“You sound the same, you know.” Skirk ducked under a blade that wasn’t there. She knew these movements; she had replayed this fight in her mind a million times. “You always did say ‘fuck’ like you were waiting for someone to come and sl--”
“Shut UP !”
Childe roared and lunged forward, tearing the construct’s head from its body before it could react. And it kept laughing, because of course it kept laughing, and laughed and laughed and laughed. Skirk had already impaled Ajax several times, and Ajax was still coming towards her, just as he always had.
“You know where I got it, right?” she called to Zhongli, her tone jeering. “The piece of him I used? The shard?”
The dragon growled, low and deep, but Childe raised a hand with a warning look and he reluctantly fell back.
“I’m sure you can imagine how much he loved it.”
The Ajax construct leaped for her, plunged his hand halfway into her chest before she kicked him off hard enough to make something crack. She glanced down at the wound with disdain.
“We were ripping each other into tiny little pieces and we still wouldn't die. Sometimes there would still be pieces of our bodies there when we started up again.” Skirk patted her chest and winked at Childe. “All I had to do was decide to take one. He let me do it. You wanna guess why?”
“Because you weren’t worth fighting.”
Why? Ajax had screamed, as close to her face as he could get. Why are you doing this?
Because you aren’t worth fighting. But I want you to be.
Childe took a step towards her, his eyes icy. “But I wanted you to be.”
The smile dropped from her face. She threw Ajax’s echo away like a toy.
“That was when I knew, see.”
She watched the echo drag itself back to its feet. It trembled still, with terror, with exhilaration, with joy. Just as he had.
“I knew I wasn’t ever gonna get out. And I knew you were. ”
Skirk pointed her sword at Childe’s face. Her eyes were still pale, and still desperate, but it seemed she had forgotten how to find it funny.
“I changed my mind,” she said pleasantly. “I won’t kill you. I’m just gonna kill everything worth coming home to. And I’m not stopping until there’s nothing left for you up here.”
“Is that what they did to you?”
It slipped out before he realized he was going to say it, far before he knew why. Skirk looked briefly stricken before letting out a derisive snort.
“Worse,” she said. “They made her a god.”
BANGBANGBANG
A cluster of gems slammed into Skirk’s chest, sending her stumbling back with a growl of surprise.
“That’s enough.”
Skirk raised her eyebrow. “And who the fuck are you?”
Ningguang said nothing. Skirk lunged for her but was stopped in her tracks by a gust of dusty wind that filled her mouth, her eyes, her nose. She let out a cough that was almost a snarl.
Ningguang stared at her. The wind blew her back once more.
A dust storm rose, the wind growing in speed and weight until it whipped around them too fast and thick to see anything but the two women still facing each other before them.
“I am Liyue’s other heart,” said the Tianquan. “Our backup plan, so to speak.”
Skirk struggled to get closer but could make no progress against the wind, could barely open her eyes. Zhongli watched Ningguang’s hand hover above the geometric catalyst floating at her side. It was familiar the way she handled it, as though it were an afterthought.
An unremarkable patch of land. The catalyst bursts from the dirt as soon as she reaches for it, humming warmly in her hands.
“You have gone too far,” said Ningguang, and her voice sounded oddly layered, as if there were two people speaking rather than one.
Why me?
Dust filled Skirk’s mouth once more when she opened it to attempt a retort, and she coughed again, harder this time.
“You would have me believe you to be the master of oblivion.”
I was never much for violence.
Ningguang extended her hand, and Zhongli imagined that he saw someone else standing behind her, holding her arm steady with grim gentleness.
“Tell me, then.”
But you, Ningguang...you have a different role to play.
For a moment only one woman stood in her place, a woman with curly hair and lavender eyes and a smile all the more menacing for the unbridled kindness of it.
“What can you claim to know of dust?”
The dust roared louder and louder until they were all blinded, until the sun was blotted out.
Only Rex Lapis kept his eyes open. Only Rex Lapis saw the two pairs of gleaming eyes. Ningguang’s hand resting on Skirk’s chest. The muffled sound of something collapsing.
Ningguang stepped back. Skirk fell to her knees. It was quiet, then.
Skirk’s eyes went wide. She clutched at her chest, clawed at it, drew out nothing but a pile of darkly glittering dust.
Ningguang looked at her for a moment before turning away. She glanced back at Beidou, at Childe and Aether and Albedo, dazed, as if she had only just now realized where she was.
She looked at Morax. Morax looked at her. She blinked slowly before inclining her head, and he hesitated for a moment before doing the same.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done ?”
Ningguang glanced at the still-kneeling Skirk and cocked an eyebrow.
“Destroying a fucking gnosis ? Are you insane? ”
She smiled slightly. “Your having seen that as an act of destruction is evidence in itself of how unqualified you are to call it your own.”
Skirk snarled, incredulous, but Ningguang’s attention had already shifted away from her once more.
“That’s new.”
Beidou pointed at the glittering catalyst still bobbing under Ningguang’s gloved hand. “Where’d it come from?”
Ningguang paused. Her eyes flicked sideways to meet Zhongli’s for a split second.
“Family heirloom,” she said evasively.
The valley lapsed into a ringing silence, motionless but for the wind’s soft whisper. Childe looked out across the open space, watching the veins of darkness slide through dirt and dust. It made him feel warm, the way they seeped up into the ley line blossoms, filling them with cramped constellations. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t go away.
“Childe?” Beidou squinted at him. “You good?”
Only the veins weren’t rushing towards the flowers anymore. And the flowers weren’t stretching towards the sun anymore. And the air had gone charged, but it was nothing like lightning at all.
Hoarsely, Skirk began to laugh. Lumine, who had been watching in silence, went suddenly wide-eyed.
“I told you,” called Skirk. “I told you what would happen if you used it without a circuit breaker.”
The abyss rushed towards a new center of gravity, the ground opening and closing at Childe’s feet as it surged into his body. When he opened his mouth all that emerged was a muffled, gurgling growl.
“Stop it.”
Aether stared at Skirk, his balled-up fists shaking.
“Let him go.”
She laughed again, raising her hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I wasn’t the one who turned myself into a bomb.”
It could have been close to a storm of light, had there been anything to reflect it. But there was only Childe, and somehow it seemed the rest of him had gone the same way as his lightless eyes, swallowing everything that touched the surface. Maybe it should have been strange, to see emptiness be consumed so easily.
“Don’t think even he can survive releasing that kind of abyssal energy.” Skirk shrugged. “I mean, not like the rest of us will, either--”
With a deafening roar, the shining dragon collapsed back into the shape of a man, folding back into himself like he was taking off a coat. He staggered forward, clutching the tusk he had wrenched from his chest in one hand. Ningguang winced.
Through the haze Zhongli remembered thinking, after he had torn out the Geo gnosis, that at least he wouldn’t have to do that again. It might have been funny, but it wasn’t, and there was no time to process how much more solid everything had become, how much shallower his soul and emptier the air felt in the absence of that song, because he was rushing towards the eye of the hurricane now, and at the eye of the hurricane was the abyss, and at the heart of the abyss was a soul that knew it for what it was, and maybe it was selfish to want him back, maybe it was selfish to ask for more, selfish in the way that only a god could understand once he had his back to the mirror.
He reached Childe, saw the closed eyes and the electric shocks running up what used to be his arms, took a deep breath and moved to plunge the gnosis back into the chest of its archon--
Childe’s eyes flew open, flat and pupil-less and full of sparks.
Wordlessly he screamed into Zhongli’s face.A ripping sound as an electrified shape tore itself from Childe’s body, sending Zhongli flying back. He landed hard; it might have hurt.
“Wouldn’t have done anything anyway,” Skirk shouted. “Too late for that.”
Zhongli was thinking about an empty seat at an old bar. He was thinking about someone smiling and waving a glaze lily in his face. He was thinking about chopsticks, and dust, and water, and things that shouldn’t have mattered, but always would.
He glanced at the others. Ningguang’s nails digging into Beidou’s arm, Albedo’s hand frozen halfway to his mouth.
The shield of shimmering gold rose, separating them from the swirling mass swallowing Childe. Zhongli hadn’t even got to his feet yet. He just knelt, hands flat against the ground, feeling how it shook. His eyes fixed silently on Childe, mouth set in a flat, resigned line. The abyss ricocheted off Zhongli’s shield, spinning gleefully and ever faster towards the center.
It always ended like this, after all.
Aether was not looking at Childe.
Aether was looking at Lumine.
Lumine paused. Lumine nodded.
“Let me out.”
Zhongli looked down, eyes so sad it made Aether want to punch him. “You won’t go with him,” he said. “He’s already gone, Aether.”
Aether felt another surge of anger, because he was sick of other people telling him when to hope and when to give up, when it was worth it and when it wasn’t, sick of other people acting like it was their right to make decisions for him. Like they were doing him some sort of favor .
“He’s not...”
He glanced at Lumine. Her expression was hard. He could hear her voice in his head, clear as it had always been.
How DARE you?
The air shook around his fist.
“He’s not fucking DEAD YET! ”
CRACK!
With an explosion of concentrated Geo energy, Aether shattered Zhongli’s shield and slipped through. Zhongli lunged for him, but he was too surprised to move quickly. A beat later the shield was in one piece again, with Aether and Childe on the wrong side.
Aether flitted between unwinding blossoms. The abyss curled around him but he didn’t slow down, moving quick enough to put the wind to shame, and watching it reminded Zhongli of the first time he had seen Aether’s sister all those months ago, the way dark tendrils had wound almost affectionately around her ankles as they did now with his.
Childe fell to one knee. His body seemed to press harder into the space around it, even as the emptiness grew, and there were cracks spiderwebbing across his face, down his neck. They opened into nothing, as they always did.
Skirk snarled. She leapt to her feet, her eyes on Aether, but as soon as she moved to close in she smashed into a wall of abyssal energy like a bird hitting a glass door.
Lumine’s arm remained outstretched, dark sword steady. She met Skirk’s incredulous gaze coldly.
“If you touch him,” she said calmly, “I’ll rip your lungs out.”
Aether had reached the center.
“ Stop it !”
The abyss rushing owards Childe flowed around him like a river parting around a rock. Childe stood, still as stone himself, his eyes emptier than ever before.
“Just stop it--Childe-- STOP IT !”
There was no reaction to the screaming. No reaction when Aether yanked violently on his sleeve so hard he nearly lost his balance. He kept staring at that blank spot on what was once grass. Aether might as well have not been there at all.
He might as well have not been there at all.
“You selfish piece of shit--LOOK at me!”
Childe turned his head very slightly. His eyes flicked towards Aether, showing no recognition. He was shaking.
Aether grabbed the armored claw, pried the stiff fingers open. Shoved something small and made of wood into it.
“You PROMISED him!” Heat pricked at the back of his eyes. “You promised me! ”
The archon stared down at the chipped wooden whale. Childe’s head snapped up.
For an instant their eyes met. They were nothing more and nothing less than terrified children in the past and present tense, and for first and last time they understood each other perfectly.
Childe screamed.
The blast was impossible to anticipate or avoid. It launched Aether halfway across the field. He landed with pounding heart and dripping hair; the energy that had struck him wasn’t the abyss, but water.
Back at the heart, Childe curled over himself. The shape made of sparks that had wrenched free when Zhongli got too close was once again visible, seemed to twine around as if embracing him, or covering a child’s eyes. A dome of liquid and electricity burst into place, surrounding them.
Silence, for a heartbeat, followed by the earsplitting crack of thick glass shattering.
The black rushed from Childe’s body, spreading across the inside of the dome until the entire surface had been stained with it. Sparks flew like warning shots from the walls of water where the dark struck them.
Suddenly the abyss retracted back into Childe’s body, leaving the dome momentarily clear for another beat of absolute, impenetrable quiet.
CRACK.
BOOM.
It burst forth once more, blackening the dome almost instantly. Crack shot across the surface and finally it broke apart, shards falling to the dirt like glass, but still the dark found no escape; it melted into the earth, having been absorbed by the water.
Slowly, as if frightened of itself, the cracked ground crept back together. Thin black wisps floated from the now-smooth earth, fading as they drifted towards the sun. A red-haired figure lay motionless.
When Zhongli began to shout, it came out far closer to the roar of a dragon than the cry of a man.
“ CHILDE! ”
He pushed forward, not bothering to pull his shield down first, not reacting when it shattered around him. Kept shouting the name as he closed the distance, watching desperately for some sort of sign that not again, not again, not again , but Childe still wasn’t moving.
Childe wasn’t moving, and his freckles were stark against paper-pale skin, and when Zhongli pulled that still body into his arms he could only feel horrified by how light it was.
The wooden whale tumbled from Childe’s limp hand. Aether followed it with his eyes as it rolled towards him and came to a stop at his feet. Silently, he reached down to pick it up.
“Don’t remember saying you could have that back.”
Aether’s head snapped up.
Zhongli froze, wide-eyed, almost afraid, like the hope was too much to bear, but Childe’s eyes were open and he was covered in blood and bruises and there was an infuriating shit-eating grin stretching across his face.
Aether stared. He coughed. He smacked Childe’s shoulder a little harder than he really needed to.
“Asshole,” he signed.
Childe held his hand out. Aether dropped the whale into it.
“Are you…” Zhongli hesitated. The relief felt misshapen, filling the space where grief should have been. “Are you...all right?”
A soft snort. “Probably not.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like shit,” Childe said cheerfully.
Zhongli took a deep breath.
“Good,” he retorted, but his voice cracked halfway through the word, and when he grabbed Childe’s head to kiss him both their faces were wet with tears, clinging to each other with white-knuckled hands. Ningguang looked oddly amused for the split second before Beidou had a similar idea of her own.
A few feet away stood Aether and Lumine, signing viciously to each other far too fast for the others to make out. Lumine pressed her lips together and turned away, stalking back towards Skirk and the hole she had torn into the air. Skirk stood beside it, her hand resting on the edge as though it were a door; in most ways that mattered, it was.
“ Why? ”
Lumine froze in her tracks at the sound of her brother’s voice. She turned back briefly, a look in her eyes like she had something to say. She clenched her fists. She said nothing.
“We’re coming back for you.” Childe looked towards Skirk. “Both of you.”
Skirk stared back at him, her expression unreadable, her eyes sharp.
“I look forward to it,” she said at last, and then she was gone. Lumine shot Aether one last glance, nodded curtly towards Childe, and then she, too, had disappeared.
For a few moments, no one had anything to say. Slowly Childe raised himself into a sitting position with a very painful-looking wince. He looked down at the twisted sharp thing lying in his hands, resting beside the whale. Beidou narrowed her eyes dangerously.
“You’re not seriously thinking about keeping that thing.”
“No, it’s not...it’s just, I had--I told someone I’d…”
His eyes fell on a pile of dark dust, the only remaining evidence of Skirk’s short-lived gnosis.
“Actually…”
He looked up at Ningguang.
“I think I have an idea.”
Ningguang raised an eyebrow, and a soft giggle blew past on the wind, no more and no less than the whisper of dust.
“My way would’ve been faster, you know.”
“I know.” Childe leaned forward, resting his forearms on the ship’s railing. “But hitching a ride with you means, you know, we’d miss all this.”
He gestured towards the open ocean, the setting sun glimmering on the tips of cresting waves. Aether wrinkled his nose and shrugged.
“Hey, actually.” Childe’s face shifted slightly, gaining that new seriousness he seemed to have learned during his second stint in the abyss. “Have something I wanted to give you.”
He pulled something small and smooth from an inner pocket of his jacket; Aether watched him, still quiet. The two of them gazed down at it.
“There are only two,” said Childe, voice low, and Aether didn’t need to ask who had the other. The abyssal vision swirled with a bottomless darkness, swallowing light, singing softly to itself.
“You’re giving it to me.”
“Only if you want it.”
“And what happens if I don’t?” Aether frowned. “Someone else has to live with it?”
“No.” Childe shook his head. “No. Probably just destroy it. I will, I mean.”
Aether considered it. His first real Vision, if he took it. He could hear it calling out to him, feel the yawning emptiness reach forward.
“You don’t have to.”
“...I know.”
He reached for it, gingerly, as if afraid it might shock him. His fingers brushed the surface.
A call. An opening. A song that never was, and always would be.
Shadows seeped from the vision, twisting together to form a handful of familiar, star-filled shapes. Aether recoiled, startled, and stared as the constructs fluttered away across the sea.
Hummingbirds. Lumine didn’t have much patience for constructs, but she always seemed to find a reason to make her hummingbirds.
“I…”
Aether swallowed hard, took a deep breath of salty air.
“I need...I need a minute.”
Childe nodded. Aether snatched the Vision from his hand and disappeared below deck. He had considered, of course, not telling Aether about the abyssal vision at all; but that, too, would have been a way of making the choice for him.
Somewhere far away, underneath a tree heavy with red leaves, a girl with pale hair and gold eyes leaned against a fallen branch. She had something dark and smooth in her hands, tossing it up and down, up and down.
Suddenly the Vision grew warm. She paused, frowning at it.
The shadows pulled free, curled into a pair of glittering dragonflies. A memory broke loose, dancing through her head even as she tried desperately to yank it back down.
That’s us.
She had laughed at him. How is that us?
And her brother shrugged, his eyes still on the two dragonflies.
It just is.
Lumine let out a shaky laugh. How awful, she thought, how wonderful, that she still missed him this much.
Zhongli watched Aether disappear into the snow-covered trees. “Did he tell you why he was leaving?”
“No.” Childe paused. “But...you know. He’ll be okay, I think.”
“Mm.”
They made their way down the street, towards Childe’s home. Zhongli gazed at the road, trying to remember how it had looked covered with empty creatures and flowers full of horrible potential. It was harder than he had expected, to imagine the peace breaking again. He wasn’t certain whether to be worried or relieved.
“We’ll help him find her,” said Childe. “Seriously.”
“Yes.” Zhongli nodded. “We do...owe him a great deal, I believe.”
The silence stretched long enough that he felt the need to glance over, and when he did, he found Childe watching him strangely.
“Even if we didn’t.” Childe stopped walking and folded his arms. “Would you still want to help?”
“What do you…?”
“Imagine--okay, listen. Imagine the whole--imagine the, the concept of owing anyone anything was just--gone, right? Just gone.”
“A little difficult, for me,” said Zhongli dryly, and Childe scowled.
“I mean ,” he continued, “that if no one owed anyone anything, and there was just--none of that. Would you still want to help Aether find his sister?”
Zhongli blinked. “I…”
“Just try.”
“That’s--of course I would.”
“Okay. Why?”
He sighed. “I told you a long time ago. Acting on want is not...familiar.”
Childe smiled.
“I think you’re getting better at it.”
Zhongli opened his mouth to respond, but before he could begin speaking, a small red-haired figure came barrelling down the sidewalk and slammed into Childe’s knees hard enough to send him flying back into the snow with a muffled noise of surprise.
“AJAX!”
The night before had been a strange one. He had been tired enough to sleep, and even stranger, to dream.
Mount Aozang looked the same as it ever had, a thicket of red and gold leaves surrounding the clear waters of the pond. They had been sitting at the old table, just as they always did, Guizhong leaning back with a knowing look in her eye.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can,” she said.
“I wish you were still here.”
Guizhong smiled. “You know well enough that I am.”
“I…” He swallowed, watching a leaf land in the water, watching the ripples spread gently from the point of impact. “I can only fail again.”
“Zhongli.”
She was looking at him now, her eyes the color of daybreak’s edge.
“What we had. What we were.”
She reached forward and grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her.
“Would you really tell me here and now that you consider it to have been a failure?”
Zhongli flinched. “I--that’s not what I--”
“You never failed me.” Guizhong’s voice rose, still gentle, still fierce. “You never failed any of us.”
“You--”
“We loved you,” she said firmly. “We love you, and we chose you, and we would choose you again, and--every time. Do you understand?”
I want to , he thought. “I’m afraid,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“What should I do?”
“You wake up.” Guizhong smiled again, warm enough to break his heart. “You wake up. You stay.”
“I don’t regret it.” Under the table, Zhongli clenched his fists. “I. I chose you, too.”
She laughed, quiet and sad, the ancient whispering of dust, and kissed him on the forehead.
I know.
When he opened his eyes Childe was still asleep, breathing steady as a heartbeat. Zhongli reached up to brush his thumb across a fading bruise on his cheekbone; Childe mumbled something incomprehensible as he rolled over.
If there was a choice to be made, Zhongli thought, it might be time to make it.
There were things he still needed to say. There were things he still wanted to say. He watched Ajax cling to his brother with tear-filled eyes. He smiled.
Maybe there was still time.