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In yet another situation where they pretended not to want to spend time with each other, Lumine and Pigeon picked their way across the outskirts of the desert. The puppet grumbled incessantly about sand getting in his joints, to which she replied that his joints didn’t show and that he was welcome to leave. He didn’t, instead offering commentary on her every misstep, fumble and awkward shuffle to get the sand out of her own crevices.
They were out collecting cactus fruit. She was one more comment away from showing him all the unpleasant places she could airblast sand when she pricked her finger.
“Ow, fuck!”
Pigeon snorted disapprovingly. She looked over her shoulder at his stupid, smug, superior expression - like Alhaitham but without the smarts to back it up.
She threw her hard earned fruit at him, which he caught effortlessly, and got to work teasing the spine out of her thumb with her teeth.
“What?” she mumbled.
“It’s just not the choice of words I’d use. Such language is uncouth.”
She yanked the spine out and narrowed her eyes. First the Shogun giving her crap about not covering her mouth when she yawned and now this? The conceit was genetic. Programmed. Whatever.
“If I’m going to indulge in profanity,” he continued, “I’d rather pursue the kind that actually means something, like… desecrating godhood, disobeying Celestia. That sort of thing.”
She rolled her eyes and started them on the path to the next cactus patch. “Well aren’t you just above it all.”
“Yes,” he said simply and way too proudly. “Vulgarities are for those with such limited vocabularies that… ‘shit’ is the most insulting thing their feeble little minds can come up with.”
Lumine laughed. She couldn’t help it. The puppet whipped around with his famous temper, baited down from his loftiness by a mere giggle. “What’s so funny?”
“You whispered that like you were afraid Nahida would hear.”
“I! I’m not afraid!” he snarled. “You know I couldn’t care less about what Lesser Lord Kusanli thinks!”
“Mmhm. Totally. That’s why you shade her with your hat when you think nobody’s watching.”
He reared back with a tiny gasp.
“Isn’t she a plant, anyway? I imagine the sun’s good for her.”
He crossed his arms and walked faster, forcing her to awkwardly half-jog. When he spoke, it was barely audible and petulant. “The desert sun is too hot. It could scorch her leaf.”
She openly stared at him. He glanced over once, looked away with the faintest blush, then turned back again to snap indignantly. “Screw you!”
“Screw me? To heck?” She let out a strangled wheeze. “Eloquent AND intense!”
He growled and pulled his hat down to hide his face, though she could see the ghost of the smile he was busy choking to death. He loved it when she fought him back.
“I can swear whenever I want to,” he grumbled.
“Then do it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
She reached out and tugged on his sleeve before he passed the next cactus stand. He obediently turned on his heel and waited off to the side while she plucked a few more red fruits, though he scowled when she went to hand them to him.
“I’m not holding your…” he trailed off.
“You can do it.”
“Shut up!” He crossed his arms and she snuck two fruits into them. He moved his hands to his hips, dropping them. “I’m not holding your… your damn fruit!”
Their eyes met. Lumine only had to raise an eyebrow for him to break away to glare at the horizon. She devolved into a snorting mess while he wrinkled his nose and shrank down until his shoulders met his ears, face bright red.
“Good job.”
“Shut.”
She finished her giggle at his expense and came around to his side for a playful hug. “Really though, it’s okay if you just don’t like swearing. Tons of people are more ‘couth’ than I am.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “I’ve murdered people. I think I’m beyond couth and polite language.”
“What does couth even mean? Who says that in casual conversation?”
He turned to her and made a face. “...Why would you use a word when you don’t know what it means?”
She shrugged and led the way to the next stand. “Wanted to sound smart, especially after someone insulted my vocabulary.”
“There’s a thing called a dictionary. You should look into one before you embarrass yourself further.”
“I don’t think there’s anything more embarrassing than beheading a man and following it up with ‘gosh hecking dang it, I got blood on my shoes’.”
He slapped her shoulder with the back of his hand. “You just said it was fine!”
She laughed and pressed into his side. “It was until you took another dig at me!”
They bickered back and forth for a few more steps, wrapping back around to the previous discussion.
“I can swear whenever I want,” Pigeon repeated, now somewhat serious. “I’m just loath to sound like Sandrone and her incessant obscenities.”
“Sandrone?”
“The 7th Harbinger.” He looked at her sidelong. “Were you not paying attention at all the last time you asked?”
“Buddy, I can barely remember your name and I picked it. There were eleven of you bastards. Give me a break.”
He put his face in his hand to muffle his giggles. He eventually came up for air and continued like she hadn’t said anything, discreetly wiping at his eyes. “Anyway, Sandrone had the foulest mouth I have ever heard in my centuries in this world, both in general profanity and creative insults... Which is strange, given her Fontaine heritage.”
“Is Fontaine known for being polite or something?”
He nodded. “Sometimes excessively so, but only at face value. They’ll gut you without a second thought so long as they call you Madame first.”
He paused and pointed at the nearby cliff. Another cactus jutted out over the edge, berry glistening in the moonlight. Lumine pouted. “I don’t wanna climb.”
“Ugh, fine.”
He took her hand and yanked her up with him, not giving her a chance to contest. She blinked as he deposited her at the top and landed gracefully next to her, completely unphased by the sudden thirty foot vertical flight.
“Uh, thank you.”
He grunted and adjusted his hat. She really wanted to ask how the hell it contributed to his flying, but there were better days to address that.
She went to collect the bunch of fruit. “So, what about the other Harbingers? Did they swear a lot?”
He frowned while he thought. “Hmm… Childe and Arlecchino swear like you do.”
“When it’s funny?”
“Basically. Columbina doesn’t swear at all, though she’s really not all there anyway.” He brushed some sand off his sleeve and pursed his lips. “Pierro preferred the Actually Profane variety, though just because I never heard him swear doesn’t mean that he doesn’t.”
Lumine paused, one leg kicked out as she balanced over the cliff. “You said he lived with my brother, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you ever going to elaborate on that?”
“No. Anyways,” he continued unbothered, even going so far to lean against the cactus Lumine precariously braced against. She was very careful to put her hand between the spines. He just took the free acupuncture without a care.
“Pulcinella watches his mouth on account of being mayor and all, but he does get colorful when surprised… or when Childe does something stupid. And then Signora swore to better hurt people.” He winced. “She was good at it.”
“Mm.”
“Regrator is… weird. Usually he’ll smile to your face and then put a knife in your back, but sometimes he’ll fly off the handle out of nowhere with the most vile things. And then he’ll apologize?”
She got her prize and walked herself back, nudging Pigeon’s shins to get him to move out of the way. He took the cue and actually helped her back to stable ground, though he did so by pulling on her scarf. She only choked a little bit.
Once she got the coughing fit out of the way, she led them towards the last cactus stand of the trip. He fell into step at her side.
“Dottore doesn’t seem much for swearing,” she commented.
“No, he isn’t. He says it’s beneath him. He didn’t spend years studying language to resort to lowly–”
He skipped a step, pupils shrinking to pinpricks as realization hit him. Lumine watched him with mild concern. Did he… consciously do that? Did he have to emote with his eyes just like he had to make himself go through the motions of breathing?
“Pigeon?”
His eyes narrowed and he popped his lips. “Son of a bitch.”
She would’ve laughed if not for the murder in his eyes, the shift in tone and the natural way that came out of his mouth. She gave him a few moments to himself while she retrieved the final fruit.
She watched him drag his hand down his face when she returned, skin unmoving under the harsh gesture. She made a questioning sound and he shook his head.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. I just…” he sighed, exhausted. “I can’t help but wonder how much of my personality is even my own.”
She raised an eyebrow. He shot her a nasty look. “Could you use your words instead of gawking at me like a stunned fish?”
She frowned and raised the other eyebrow, now annoyed. “This means ‘please continue, I want to hear more’.”
“I know what it means, you insensitive… ass,” he mumbled experimentally. She did her very best not to smile at his newfound rebellion. “I taught myself all of that human expression nonsense. I just don’t appreciate being stared at.”
“Alright, alright. What were you saying about your personality?”
They turned to walk back towards the city. Pigeon sighed. “The more I think about it, the more I realize that the traits I value in myself were either put there by suggestion or adopted from someone else’s personality.”
She waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, “That’s how everyone is.”
“Eh?”
“Yeah, that’s just how personalities work. People don’t come with one pre-installed.”
He made a face at her.
“Have you ever seen a baby? Like, interacted with one for any length of time?” she asked.
“Have you?!”
…He had her there. She was sure there’d been at least one in the past, but she’d still yet to see a baby in Teyvat. She cleared her throat and refocused on the important thing. “Well I was one once and literally speaking, you weren’t. That makes me the expert. Trust me when I say that everyone develops their personality that way.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure some stuff is innate, but I believe that almost everything about us is shaped by the people around us and our experiences. I mean, look at me and my brother. We’re twins. We were similar in a lot of ways, but we had different personalities because we had different experiences and got different meanings out of them.”
She snorted. “And now we’re so different that we’ve somehow ended up on opposite sides of a war.”
Pigeon hummed while she continued.
“A lot can happen in five hundred years. I’m sure what he’s doing makes perfect sense to him, and I don’t doubt that I would do the exact same thing if I was in his place.”
He tilted his head at her. “I expected you to be more confident that you’d do the right thing.”
“Eh,” she mumbled and kicked a rock, careful to avoid a scarab busily shuffling its turd around. “I’d like to think that, but like I said, we’re made up of our experiences. I try not to get too comfortable in my goodness.”
“...Did you just brag about your humility?”
“Sure.”
They walked in silence for a minute. Pigeon frowned thoughtfully, probably looking for something in her point to nitpick that wouldn’t make him look bad. Eventually, he looked back at her.
“Why are you so good at this?”
Not what she expected but alright. “Good at what?”
“This… feeling… bullshit.”
“Please stop swearing. You sound like a tween who just learned the bad words.”
He gave her a flat stare and even flatter voice. “I take it back. You’re terrible at this.”
She laughed and slung an arm around his neck, eerily cool and smooth. He didn’t resist as she gave him a little squeeze. “I have a lot of experience and a lot of good people to lean on.”
“I have a lot of experience too,” he grumbled.
She gave him a partly pitying, mostly disbelieving look. “...With the most emotionally repressed people in all of Teyvat. You realize that being around people actively trying to make you worse tends to stunt your growth, right? Like that’s the logical result?”
“Don’t patronize me,” he snapped.
“I’m not.” She bumped her head into the side of his, then released him. It was hard to walk arm over shoulder like that. “I’m sorry for putting this in a way that’s probably going to upset you…”
“That’s never stopped anyone before.”
She ignored the comment. “You were a victim of an incredibly intelligent and dangerous monster that knew exactly what he was doing. Of course you came out a little messed up. Anyone would, even me.”
He glared at her sidelong, clearly uncomfortable with the word victim. “You’re not honestly trying to excuse my actions, are you?”
“No, no. The murder was way out of line. I’m saying that the anger and overall bad attitude make total sense. How exactly were you supposed to learn how to do anything in a healthy way surrounded by those lunatics? They wanted you to be like them.”
He mulled it over, probably trying to find a way to self flagellate in the face of her flawless logic. He pouted on failing. “I hate talking to you.”
“I know. But you keep doing it.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, Lesser Lord Kusanali did say that the best medicines are bitter.”
“Aww!”
He gave her a disgusted look. “...Please don’t make that sound again.”
“But you just admitted that you feel better after being around me!” She was pretty sure solar eclipses were less rare than the man expressing something positive.
“Did I ever suggest otherwise?”
“Er, well, not explicitly, but–”
He waved her off. “Don’t assume things. I do what I want. If I did not want to spend time with you, I simply wouldn’t.”
He took a few grumpy steps. “Even if it means finding out more things about myself that I dislike.”
Well that was a pleasant change from his previous transactional attitude. In the past, he’d made it clear he only joined her to pay back a debt.
They continued their walk back to the city for a few minutes, each retreating into their own thoughts. Eventually, Lumine nudged his hip. “You know, I do actually like the personality you’ve got.”
He snorted. “Don’t lie to make me feel better.”
“I’m not. I would never lie to you about something like this.”
He turned to search her face for deceit. Finding none, he gave her an incredulous look. “Really? You actually like this?” he asked and gestured at himself.
She just chuckled and kept walking. “Of course. I can appreciate being an unholy little shit to spite the people that hurt you. It gives you a feeling of control over your life, right? That way you can tell yourself that you push people away on purpose instead of admitting that they left you. It’s the same reason I don’t tell people about my problems. It feels better to blame myself for not opening up than it does to risk being vulnerable and not get what I need.”
Pigeon paused and put his hand over his chest. “...What the hell?”
She looked over her shoulder at him, sweet as can be. “Oh, Nahida hasn’t hit you with that one yet?”
He just blinked a few times and rubbed his sternum, slowly closing his mouth. She gave him a moment to overcome the mortifying ordeal of being known before she continued.
“And you have a justifiable rage at the unfairness of your life.”
“There’s no such thing as fair in this world,” he said automatically.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, look who thinks they’re so deep and dark and wise by being a little pessimist.”
His jaw dropped again. “Is this a pep talk or not?!”
“It was until you started nitpicking. Fine, fairness doesn’t exist. But you do recognize that what happened to you was wrong, and I think it’s awesome that you’re mad about it.”
He stopped walking and just stared after her. She noticed after about five feet, then gestured for him to join her on a nearby rock. They had all night to make it back to the city, after all.
He obliged and sat crosslegged across from her, suspicious. Moonlight lit the rolling sands and brought out the blue in his eyes. It suited him much better than purple.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow for him to continue, caught his glare, then said it out loud. “Don’t understand what?”
“You just seem so… perfect,” he said, though his tone on the last word made it clear it was anything but a compliment. “I don’t get it. How can you possibly understand all of this so much better than I do?”
She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the night sky with its thousands of false stars. “Mmm… we met at a good point in my life. I wasn’t always this stable.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“Bet.”
She might as well open up a little bit. Lumine tore her gaze away from the sky to give him a smug look. “You know my brother almost left me once?”
He cocked his head, disbelief written in every line of his face. “Seriously?”
“Mmhm. It was a loooong time ago in another world. One of our good friends was murdered and I… kinda… lost my cool. I hunted down everyone even remotely responsible during our stay. Eventually Aether and I saved that world and needed to move onto the next, but I just couldn’t let it go. I insisted on revenge.”
She noticed him staring so she looked over. “What?”
“ You had a revenge thing? Miss peace and love?!”
“Yeah. Why do you think I feel so strongly about it now?” She let that sink in for a second. “It was a whole big thing. I mistook Aether wanting to let it go for not caring. I went on a rampage, Aether and I got in a huge fight and the only thing stopping me from doing something totally unforgivable was him threatening to ditch me.”
Pigeon blinked. “...Wow. I thought it was you two against the world.”
“Normally, yes, but our morals come first. Usually they align. That was the first time they didn’t, but it’s also why I’m not completely losing my mind over the Abyss Prince thing. I came around and I’m sure he will too.”
“Huh...”
She reached over and patted his knee. “Anyway, I’ve seen and done some stuff. Just because I didn’t do anything quite as awful as you doesn’t mean I can’t empathize.”
He stared into his lap, totally motionless save for the tiny saccades of his eyes while he thought. At length, he looked back at her. “...Thank you for sharing that.”
“Of course.” She stood and offered her hand, which he surprisingly took. “Anyway, that’s a big part of why I like your personality so much. I see a lot of myself in you, and sometimes it’s nice to have someone around that isn’t all sunshine and unicorn farts.”
He shook his head, clearly still not quite able to believe she meant that but not wanting to argue further. He marched down the path towards the city once more, slow enough that she could comfortably keep up.
“I never pegged you for an egomaniac,” he eventually said.
“Hm?”
“You only like my company because I remind you of yourself? Really?” he joked, some of the humor from earlier returning. “Are you sure you haven’t surrounded yourself with bad influences too?”
“Is that a self-burn?”
He latticed his hands behind his head, momentarily getting his arm caught in one of his hat’s streamers, then stuck his tongue out at her. “Perhaps.”
She laughed and stretched, throwing her head back to the cool embrace of the stars and wind. “Ah, the self-destructive urge to take me down with you. I know it well.”
“Shut up, no you don’t.”
She grinned at him. “Oh buddy, you have no idea.”
He smiled as he ranted. “You can’t know everything! There’s no way. There’s gotta be something you can’t relate to.”
“My experiences are vast and varied, especially compared to your… weirdly sheltered life.”
“No, no. There’s no way! You’re making some of this up! You’re a liar and I call bull… bullshit,” he whispered at the end.
“At least I can say fuck without blushing.”
He took his hat off and bonked her with it. She broke into howling laughter and sprinted away, him close at her heels.
“Liar!”
“I’m not!” she giggled and vaulted over a rock, leading them home. She’d never seen him play before. A quick look over her shoulder had her tumbling into the sand as he tackled her, much closer than she expected.
He laughed and hauled her to her feet. “You’re getting slower.”
“Or you’re getting faster,” she grumbled good-naturedly and shook the sand out of her dress, still reeling from the play. He didn’t do that. He didn’t let people touch him, he didn’t use his hat for jokes and he certainly didn’t chase after people in impromptu games of tag. Pigeon was doing better.
He chuckled and continued to saunter down the path, oblivious to her joy. “Whatever you need to tell yourself. Come on, let’s get back to Lesser Lord Kusanali. I’m hungry and I have other things to do tonight.”
“Since when do you get hungry? I thought you didn’t need to eat.”
“I don’t need to, but it’s nice sometimes.” He shrugged, then glared over at her. “Don’t tell me that you’re finding some way to psychoanalyze that.”
“Well…”
He grabbed his bangs dramatically. “Oh my God, give me ten minutes to process the first thing before you start on another! You’re worse than Nahida!”
She covered her mouth and pointed at him, eyes scrunched in delight. “That’s the first time you’ve called her by name instead of title!”
“AH! Leave me alone!” he screamed and took to the air, outpacing her easily.
“You’re starting to trust her!”
“Stop it!”
She chased him all the way back to Sumeru city, yelling sweet things at him while he shot back with hesitant profanity. He was back to his usual broody self by the time they sat down for dinner, but it was alright. They had a good night.
And as Pigeon left for his favorite perch in the depths of the sanctuary, she was content knowing they would have many more.