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Childe doesn’t remember waking up.
A beautifully-detailed light fixture hangs right above him, and the room has a much higher ceiling than what he’s used to. He twitches his fingers, and then immediately reaches for his weapon, only to realize there is nothing around him but neatly-folded bedsheets and the pillow his head was resting on. When he gets up, he sees no one else around him, nothing but a lone table with an unfamiliar Liyuen meal that has already gone cold. A large bookshelf, filled to the brim in all sorts of tomes stands tall on the other end. No matter where he looks, he can’t find any of his weapons. He can’t even find his mask.
Childe’s steps are light as he explores the room, making no sound against the tiles. Thick curtains adorn every wall of the room, as if trying to hide Childe from view. When he pulls some of the curtains back, he stops suddenly.
Behind those curtains is a sliding door made of paper-- and he can see the shadow of another person on the other side.
He reasons that, if they want to do something to him, they would’ve done so already. Or perhaps they did? After all, he doesn’t remember waking here. As the shadow on the other side moves to open the door, Childe’s mind races with possibilities, trying to find impromptu weapons, trying to figure out why the fuck he’s here-- did someone figure him out? Was he drugged? Where--
“Childe,” Zhongli says, and all of the sudden, Childe’s worries hit the pause button for a moment. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.”
Almost on instinct, an easy smile slides across Childe’s face as he studies the familiar man. Loose shoulders, impeccable suit, bright amber eyes-- Zhongli looks the same as always. “My, Zhongli, if you wanted to come into my room so badly, you could’ve just asked politely instead of taking me here.” His tease rolls naturally off his tongue, even though he knows Zhongli won’t get it. Or maybe that’s why he says it.
“You were hurt,” Zhongli explains, and Childe manages to catch his surprise before it appears plainly on his face. “I brought you to my manor to recover in safety.”
The first thing Childe does is put a hand on his chest. For someone who has supposedly been hurt badly enough for Zhongli to bring him into his own home, he feels perfectly fine. “There was an ambush on Snezhnayan diplomats,” Zhongli continues, and the faint flicker of genuine regret gives Childe no reason to disbelieve him. “We were careless. Such a breach in security, especially to foreign guests, is of great shame to us.”
Childe takes the information in and quickly tries to make sense of it all. If they’ve been ambushed, then it’s possible that his motive-- the reason why he was sent here was discovered. Or it could be because of a completely different incident: the Fatui have made more than a few enemies, and though he doubts any of them could have successfully ambushed him, the world is full of surprises. He supposes, then, that he should probably ask Zhongli more about what he knows, but when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is:
“And you felt bad enough about it,” Childe hums, “to personally bring me to your house?”
“Yes,” Zhongli says, in that earnest way where he responds to every rhetorical question as seriously as possible, and the only thing Childe can do is laugh.
And then, it hits him--
The blinding pain, the twist of a knife, something deep his chest shakes and sends him sprawling onto the floor. He remembers his training, curls up as he falls to try to protect the wound, except there is no wound, because he just touched his chest and there was nothing there, was there?
“Childe--”
“I’m fine,” Childe coughs, waving Zhongli off as he grabs the table and forces himself up. Whatever that was, it’s no pain he’s familiar with-- and he’s familiar with quite a lot. “Now... what the hell was that?”
Zhongli steps back, adjusting the gloves on his hands-- a nervous tic? He’s never seen the man fidget before-- “Poison,” Zhongli explains, and Childe nods in response. Great. Just perfect. “Rest assured that I am doing everything in my power to find a cure.”
“Okay,” Childe breathes, forcing himself back upright. “Got any leads?”
“...No,” Zhongli answers straightforwardly. “But that is why you are here, Childe. To the outside world, you are missing, presumed dead. They will not think to look for you in my home. Until I find the perpetrators, you are to remain here where you are safe, and take care not to strain yourself.”
Childe grips at his chest. What a fucking mess. If he’s presumed dead, it’ll be incredibly difficult to contact his Snezhnayan comrades without raising alarm-- if they’re even alive. He doubts so, seeing that whoever got the drop on them managed to take him out of commission. As his fingers dig into his clothes, he realizes that the pain has gone completely, leaving just the whisper of a memory.
Okay. Acute and extremely debilitating, but not constant, and also hasn’t killed him yet. That probably narrows it down quite a bit.
“Alright,” Childe says, sitting down at the table. “I suppose that leaves me in your care, doesn’t it, Zhongli?”
It’s just like you, to invite someone like me into your home, is what remains unsaid as Childe’s eyes flicker over Zhongli’s face with an easy smile, as if he hadn’t just doubled over in excruciating pain seconds prior. “Please stay for as long as you need,” Zhongli says, and with how the light in the room illuminates his face, he almost looks like he’s made of marble. “You are more than welcome.”
“You say that like I have a choice,” Childe muses.
Zhongli’s mouth twitches into a smile. Childe isn’t quite sure why.
-----
As someone who has just had an attempt on his life, Childe isn’t very preoccupied with finding out why. Instead, he quickly settles into the routine of living as Zhongli’s guest: Zhongli personally brings him meals at 8am, 12pm and 7pm like clockwork, and they always eat together, as if Zhongli doesn’t have anything else to do. Childe isn’t allowed out the room, for fear that pedestrians may spot him through one of Zhongli’s many windows, but he is working on a way to let him take strolls in the garden. “I apologize. It must be dreadfully boring,” Zhongli says during one of their mealtimes.
“I have to say, you are much better company than that dusty old bookshelf,” Childe admits.
For the purposes of entertainment while Zhongli tries to track down a cure, he has stocked Childe’s room with entire shelves of books, and for lack of anything better to do, Childe has been skimming through all of them. Their contents prove to Childe, once and for all, that Zhongli is actually a decrepit old geezer living in a young man’s skin, because he has no idea who the fuck would willingly read that many history novels dryly detailing the most boring stories in Liyue’s incredibly interesting history, unless they were locked in a room with nothing else to do.
Which, coincidentally, Childe just so happens to be. At the very least, it explains how Zhongli is so incredibly well-learnt and yet so... him.
“Are the books not up to standard? Perhaps I will be the storyteller instead,” Zhongli says, and even though Childe’s first thought is to wonder why Zhongli has such an abundance of free time despite apparently scrying the entirety of Teyvat for a cure to Childe’s affliction, he takes Zhongli up on the offer.
And so their mealtimes go from one hour to twice of that, as Zhongli recounts tales of olde that Childe has never heard a single mention of. “I have read many old legends,” Zhongli explains, as if that explains how he tells every single one of them with stunning detail, from the color of the autumn leaves to the way the wind blew. He can almost feel La Signora in his head every time Zhongli speaks, screaming at Childe for wasting time, unnecessary fraternization with the enemy, so on so forth-- but Childe justifies that his circumstances are fairly unique, and thus, such fraternizations are essential for his continued mental well-being.
Not as if he didn’t fraternize with Zhongli much more than protocol entailed even before this.
Sometimes, the pain strikes him when he least expects it-- when his eyes flicker over the expression on Zhongli’s features, studying his amber eyes, watching them flash ever so briefly in panic as Childe coughs and buries his face in his hands, biting his lips so hard he can almost draw blood. “It’s no problem,” Childe laughs, brushing it off like nothing, and while the pain comes and goes quickly enough, he soon realizes that it only strikes when Zhongli is with him.
A conspiratorial part of him wonders if this is some kind of long-con: if Zhongli’s placed him under some sort of spell, which is why the agonizing sensations only ripple through him when Childe looks a little too deeply into Zhongli’s amber eyes. But he discards the thought quickly, because frankly, it makes no sense. Zhongli has nothing to gain and literally everything to lose by housing him here.
Whenever Zhongli looks at him in worry, Childe wonders how much of Zhongli’s kindness will remain once he realizes that Childe is here to kill his god.
Childe knows that the longer he stays, the longer Zhongli investigates, the more likely he’ll be found out, and it’ll all be over. Somehow, that doesn’t drive Childe to action-- maybe he likes to think that he’s covered his tracks superbly well.
Or, maybe, just maybe-- the more dangerous thought, one that Childe has successfully suppressed deep within him for a long, long time, one that is finally clawing its way to the surface because of how long he’s been forced to look into Zhongli’s piercing amber eyes in close proximity-- it’s because he greatly enjoys Zhongli’s company.
About a week into Childe’s solitary confinement, Zhongli tells him a love story.
“This tale is of a romance borne between adepti and mortal,” Zhongli begins, and Childe’s eyes flash in amusement.
“That’s an interesting change from the usual legends of bloody, unromantic battles,” Childe hums. “Are you trying to tell me something, Zhongli?”
The absolute lack of any reaction from Zhongli whenever Childe pushes the boundary both frustrates and emboldens him all at once. “It involves a battle,” Zhongli says, and Childe just laughs to himself because of course, of course. “But most importantly, this is a love story about the vastness of the night sky.”
Zhongli tells him of the sun, the moon, and the glittering galaxy of stars that lie between them. He tells Childe of an adepti, chained to immortality, and a mortal, living as free as the wind. He tells Childe of how they both knew their love was foolish, but they loved all the same, and in their quiet moments together they would gaze up at the night sky and draw out the constellations, the same ones that remained when adepti still lived and the mortal was long, long gone.
Childe has to admit, he is a sucker for a tragic love story. He asks Zhongli to continue, even when he decides to crawl in to the bedsheets and close his eyes. When Childe closes his eyes, knowing full well that he should not be sleeping in front of a man whose god he is trying to steal the heart of, he drifts off an in his dream he sees the night sky and its vastness of stars.
-----
A week after that, Childe realizes he is too self-aware to continue lying to himself, and accepts the extremely unsettling realization that he is in love with Zhongli.
It doesn’t surprise him one bit, because this has been a fact for an excruciatingly long time. Most enemies of the state generally don’t find themselves drawn to speaking with locals for over half of their waking hours, or, in the time before Childe was locked up in here, constantly find excuses to spend time with Zhongli. This is intelligence gathering, he justified to himself at first, and when he realized Zhongli didn’t have any actual intelligence in his thick skull, he twisted it into this is networking.
Now, as he asks Zhongli to literally speak with him till he falls asleep, Childe has officially run out of excuses.
“Why?”
“Why?” Zhongli pauses, confused at Childe’s sudden question. He puts down his chopsticks, looking at Childe. “What do you mean?”
“Why do you bend over backwards to accommodate me?” Childe gives Zhongli a sly grin, and even more so in the moonlight than the sunshine, Zhongli looks like he is sculpted out of marble. “Surely you, director of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, have better things to do than tell me old stories for an entire day.”
Zhongli blinks owlishly, at if that thought had never occurred to him. “Because you are an esteemed guest,” he says, and Childe almost lets out a suffering sigh at Zhongli’s unwavering resolve towards utter professionalism-- “And because you are important to me,” he adds in, so frankly and earnestly Childe nearly lets his cool facade slip.
“Important to you?” Childe is a superb actor, however, and he refuses to let his feelings show on his sleeve. “How so, my dear friend?”
“Well... you often help me with matters concerning the discussion of funding,” Zhongli replies and Childe bursts into laughter. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, oh-- so it’s because I give you money,” Childe says, because of course. Everything is utterly transactional in Liyue, in Snezhnaya, everywhere. Even the most painfully earnest and utterly stern airhead in all of Liyue is the same.
“There is more,” Zhongli continues, and Childe tries desperately not to let hope bubble up within his heart when this is a place where there is no hope to be found. “You are... good to me, Childe. Many in Liyue, from the Liyue Qixing to the merchants on the street, all of them come to me asking for something. It is not that I do not understand why-- our god is the god of Contracts, after all, and so is the saying that all bonds in Liyue are forged in Mora. When someone comes to me with something to give, the unsaid stipulation is that eventually, there will be something they want to take.”
Childe manages to avoid letting his smile become strained. “And I am somehow different? Because I frivolously throw money at you from the depths of Snezhnaya’s coffers?”
“No,” Zhongli says, and he fidgets again, adjusting his gloves-- they twitch imperceptibly close to Childe’s fingers. “Because you speak plainly with me. You do not attempt to impress me, nor find the need to degrade me. You are as you are, and I am as I am.”
“That is the most long-winded way of saying,” Childe replies, “that you can be yourself with me.”
“Yes,” Zhongli admits, and the ghost of a smile graces his gentle features. “I hope you can be true to me, as well.”
There are so many damn things Childe wants to say at once: that ‘be true to me’ has a double-meaning, that he always knew Zhongli was a sentimental fool, that he is lying, he has always been lying, he isn’t real and Zhongli will never know the real him because he will only see it when he has Rex Lapis’ Gnosis between his fingers, and by then, by then, Zhongli, you will no longer want to know the real me.
But instead, he just laughs, one that is both full-bodied and yet infinitely hollow at the same time, because Childe has never worn his mask around Zhongli because their ridiculous banters, the way he teases the Liyuen man and the way he falls asleep to his stories are all real, they are all genuine and he is sorry, maybe, that after the eventual betrayal that is written in the stars Zhongli will have no way of realizing this; realizing that Childe, with all his lies and schemes and the innumerable roles he is bound to play, is also true to Zhongli, in the only way he can be.
None of those words leave his mouth because it is pointless to spill his heart out to someone who can never receive it. So instead, Childe just watches Zhongli’s fingers twitch, hovering closer to Childe’s hand, as if he wants to take it-- and just as Childe’s heart seems to stop, Zhongli pulls back, and Childe can only laugh again at Zhongli’s shyness. “What, Zhongli?” Childe clears his throat, looking back into Zhongli’s piercing amber eyes. “Do you want to touch me?”
“No,” Zhongli says, and Childe hides how that single word twists the knife in his chest more strongly than the accursed poison possibly ever could. “I simply thought you were about to topple over in your chair, from the way you were laughing.”
“Ah, how unfortunate,” Childe teases, except he knows full well he’s less teasing and more pushing at the edge of fate to try to snatch what can never be his. “Perhaps one day, you will gather the courage to touch me, Zhongli.”
“It is not a matter of bravery, but propriety,” Zhongli answers, painfully earnest once again, and though Zhongli is right there he seems so very far away, like the glittering galaxies of stars in the night sky. “But enough of that. I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“Please stay for as long as you need,” Childe says, repeating Zhongli’s words to him on his first day here. “You are more than welcome.”
“Good night, Childe,” Zhongli says, and when the man closes the door behind him, Childe suddenly feels abjectly alone.
-----
The next day, Zhongli doesn’t come into his room on time.
Childe doesn’t actually have a clock. He tracks the passage of time by the meals he shares and the path of the sun in the sky. But when dawn turns to noon turns to dusk, he realizes, suddenly, that something is wrong.
Strangely, he doesn’t feel hungry at all. Perhaps it’s because Zhongli has been feeding him a little too well-- he’s certainly taken great care in preparing their meals, even giving Childe a fork and spoon so he doesn’t have to struggle with Liyuen cutlery. Sometimes, they contain strange ingredients like lizard tails and slime condensate-- courtesy of the chef, apparently-- but they are always spectacular. Nevertheless, Childe knows that when someone sticks to a schedule as rigidly as Zhongli does, it’s generally a pretty worrying occurrence when they suddenly deviate without any explanation.
So Childe does something he hasn’t dared to do in the last two weeks: leave his room.
When he pulls back the curtain and quietly opens the paper-screen door, he realizes that his room is connected to a vast hallway, more fitting of a massive shrine than someone’s personal home. The red walls are adorned in what Childe thinks are good-luck charms and talismans. He never realized Zhongli was the religious type.
He realizes then that the hallway also possesses no windows.
When he steps out into the empty hallway, he finds himself inexplicably tempted to look towards his right. Childe looks towards it, and sees a grand, intricately-designed door, right at the end of the large hall. Wood carvings of twisting dragons snake up its columns and a massive symbol of the Geo Archon lies in its centre. He supposes that, if there are any places where Zhongli keeps his secrets, it must be behind that door.
“--the traitor, you--”
Childe stops dead in his tracks, and turns around to the sound of that unfamiliar voice. It’s not coming from the hallway, but from behind a door much further to his left-- quite obviously the entrance to this massive structure. He ponders over whether he should hide, whether Zhongli would be angry at him after all the effort he’s put in, only for Childe to be discovered alive through the fault of his own curiosity-- but Childe doesn’t have to decide, because the door suddenly bursts open, and he quickly dives back into his room.
“You are absolutely hopeless,” the voice hisses, and then Childe realizes it is not unfamiliar: it is Adeptus Xiao, who Zhongli had brought him to meet once-- the first sign Childe received of Zhongli’s disproportionate reach over Liyue despite seeming so untainted by the Geo nation’s transactional philosophy and unrelenting greed. He can almost imagine the scowl on Xiao’s face as he speaks, in harsh tones: “What do you even hope to achieve, Rex Lapis?”
Childe’s breath hitches. He doesn’t know why Xiao is here, but he has brought the target of the Fatui right here, right into Childe’s hands. For a moment, instinct takes over-- he looks around again for a weapon, not wanting to face down a god with only his bare fists, but in the absence of any good options he opts to keep the door slightly open to hear the rest of the exchange, to peek at the face of this Archon who had sacrificed their own draconic form to hide from the Fatui.
So he doesn’t quite know what to do once he hears Zhongli reply.
“I only ask a simple question,” Zhongli says, and the commanding tone he takes towards Xiao almost makes him unrecognizable, yet so utterly familiar all the same. “The girl at Bubu Pharmacy. Her reanimation is of your work. Please work with me, and we can--”
“Work with you? Why?” Xiao snaps back, and the sound of wind slamming against rock rings through the hall. “Have you gone daft? Has your time in Celestia rotted whatever remains inside your head, Rex Lapis? The Fatui betrayed you. Tartaglia betrayed you.”
When Xiao says his name, his real name, mangled pronunciation and everything, every bout of pain that had wracked his body suddenly comes back, all at once. Childe falls to his knees, head pressed to the floor because it’s just too much, too difficult to even look up, it’s like his chest is being torn wide open and the wound only deepens as Xiao continues-- “Either I get rid of this evil spirit for you, or time will. Remember: the Seventh Month ends in just three days.”
Childe doesn’t understand Xiao’s statement, but he doesn’t have the time to ponder it-- as he struggles to get back on his feet, in such pain that the world seems to be closing in on him, the adepti slams the door open, looking right at Childe. “Just say the word, Rex Lapis.”
As Childe looks up, he can just barely see Zhongli’s amber eyes, and they seem to swirl in the darkness like the stars in the sky as he blacks out.
-----
Childe doesn’t remember waking up.
When he looks to his side and sees Zhongli sitting there, he opens his mouth to say something, anything, but Zhongli speaks first: “I had always known,” and it is a declaration, as the Geo Archon turns to look right through Childe.
“You...” For someone who has spent his entire life dancing around others with words of wit, Childe is now left with absolutely nothing. “Zhongli? Morax?”
“And you had always known,” Zhongli says, and Childe almost wants to retort, no, never, I didn’t, I never intended to betray you, only your god. But it dies in his throat because, actually, maybe he did: in the way his eyes shone amber, in the old tales he spoke of, in the way everyone in Liyue somehow just bends to his will despite the fact that a man like him could never survive in the city of commerce. Maybe he did figure it out, but he just lied to himself, like how he’d lied about falling in love with his own target, or how he relentlessly teased the man only to hide his own profane feelings.
Because Zhongli is sacred, Geo Archon, God of Contracts, man made of marble-- and Childe is just there, pathetically laying in bed, petrified by Zhongli’s piercing gaze. “I didn’t,” Childe manages to gasp, and Zhongli’s stoic expression falters, as if he wasn’t expecting that. “I had absolutely no idea. You always find a way to surprise me.”
And Childe almost laughs, because why the fuck is he still finding it in him to joke around at a time like this? He gets out of bed, but then immediately collapses, as if the poison in his chest is also a chain dragging him straight down to hell. “I-- tsk, fuck--” Childe bites back the unbearable, agonizing pain, lifting his head and he feels his chest be torn apart again, and again, and again-- “Why? Why keep me?”
“Because you are as you are, and I am as I am.” Zhongli says this as if it explains anything at all, and then he gets up from his chair, walking towards Childe.
For a moment, he thinks Zhongli is going to help him up, but as he steps closer, he falters. “Because I had no need for pretenses when I was with you,” Zhongli clarifies, and it’s better, just slightly, but nowhere near good enough for the whirlwind of questions that occupy the part of Childe’s mind that isn’t consumed by pain. “And I had hoped a day would come where you would have no need for pretenses when you were with me.”
Childe’s voice is withering and weak as he tries to stand, and this time, he truly has nothing left up his sleeve-- he is exposed, open, nothing but a hopeless mess under the eyes of a god, and if Zhongli has already found out everything about him, then what is there left to hide?
“Touch me,” Childe gasps, the pain threatening to take away his conscious mind yet again. “Touch me, please.”
In the final moments of his clouding vision, he sees Zhongli turn around and walk away.
-----
(And then he dreams again--
Not of the night sky, nor the dots of amber that make up the stars. He dreams another life, of a place south of Liyue Harbor, adorned in gold. He dreams of plunging his hand into Zhongli’s chest, how fragile his Gnosis looked in his hand. He dreams of the silence between them, how Zhongli had just looked at him, unreadable, while Lumine cursed obscenities and struggled onto her feet. He dreams about how, in the light reflecting off gold, the Geo Archon’s Gnosis looked just like his piercing amber eyes.)
-----
If what Childe felt before in the hallway was a temptation, now, it is a unrelenting pull at his very soul. When he drifts from a dream of amber lights into the all-too-familiar light of the cramped room he had so comfortably called home, he doesn’t even hesitate before pulling away the curtains and opening the door.
The hallway is empty again, and he cannot tell if it is day or night without the windows but he knows enough to realize that the passage of time no longer matters. He walks out, footsteps not making a sound as he travels towards the door he had been drawn to. He places both hands on the wood carving of the Geo Archon’s symbol, and he pushes.
Despite Childe’s expectations, the room is modest, lit only by candles. He is almost disappointed, really, until he more closely studies the structure right in the middle of it.
He steps forward and realizes it is an open coffin. The scent of violetgrass is strong, likely for preserving the corpse, and Childe notices a massive hole in the man’s chest: the obvious cause of his death.
And then he walks closer, and realizes something that should’ve been very, very obvious.
This isn’t Zhongli’s home. This is Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, and the body in the casket has the same face Childe has seen in the mirror his entire life.
“Childe.”
He turns around and sees Zhongli standing there at the doorway, face barely illuminated by the candlelight. While Zhongli had stared Childe down with a piercing gaze the night before, there is no scrutiny in his expression: only grief.
Childe doesn’t want for him to speak. He doesn’t want to fucking hear Zhongli’s riddles. He dashes towards the doorway and knows better than to dodge Zhongli’s frame. When Childe runs out of the room, he passes right through Zhongli as though he was made of air, and disappears down the hallway.
-----
But Zhongli knows where to find him: within the Golden House, in the light reflecting off gold.
Now, Childe’s weapons are back, as well as the mask he had always worn atop his head when he still breathed. But Zhongli knows they pose no threat to him: it’s just a snapshot of an old memory.
“Do you remember?” Childe gets the upper hand this time, speaking serenely as Zhongli stops to listen. “The first time we met. I was new here, at my first business meeting. I didn’t realize you Liyuens loved to conduct them over grand meals. I had no idea how to use chopsticks, and used them like skewers... the shit-eating grin you had on your face as you watched me struggle. You tried to teach me, but I never really learnt.”
The memory is innocent, innocent enough to bring an unbidden smile to Zhongli’s face. Childe turns around to face him, and now it is there, clear as day: the gaping hole in his chest, the source of all his pain. “It’s because I hesitated,” Childe laughs, that airy chuckle of his, as if his lungs have not been torn asunder. “That’s how Xiao managed to kill me. Pathetic, isn’t it?”
Even as he speaks, the glow of the Vision on his body seems to dim, and Zhongli begins to see the golden light of the mint filtering through him. “I guess you were always a bit more perceptive than I thought you were,” Childe hums, “realizing that I would come back. I honestly thought you had no idea. That when I took your Gnosis, you’d think everything we shared was just an act in the role I had to play. I have to say, that 'poison' thing... for such an honest man, you are exceptional at lying.”
Zhongli doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing left to say. The ghost of Childe steps forward, closing the distance between them, but in reality they both know that they are too far apart to ever meet again, like the sun and the moon separated by the vast valley of stars. “I really meant it, when I said I didn’t know,” he says, and Childe’s smile finally reaches his eyes. “But I think, even if I did, I would’ve acted the exact same way. All things considered, I really didn’t have to put much of an act in front of you after all.”
He steps forward and plants a kiss on Zhongli’s lips, and even though Zhongli only feels a light brush of air, it is the sweetest kiss Childe could have ever given him. “I love you. Good-bye.”
Zhongli closes his eyes, and when he opens them, he is standing alone, light reflecting off gold like the glittering galaxies in the sky.