Chapter Text
There was a paper Zhongli had read in his early days in the Akademiya that strangely remained etched in his mind even now.
What it really had been about did not especially matter, only that it spoke in-depth of the Chasm. It had begun describing the location in perfunctory terms: Liyue's grandest mine, stretching across miles — once thriving, now hollowed out from within by human hands. Exhausted and unstable by the turn of the century, the author said.
What had captured his attention was the inexplicable resentment that bled into the prose, forgetting its academic tone: Liyue's prosperity came at a cost, it said, imagining the Chasm as a slumbering beast. Its peaks; jagged teeth piercing the skies one moment, hands reaching out into emptiness the next.
What Zhongli remembered best — what had seized his already-flawless memory — was the description of the long defunct mine entrance. The maw: the greedy, gaping thing it was. Once glittering from within, now stripped of its treasures. Yearning for another taste of the dreams and desires of all who descended into its depths.
Zhongli had found the paper in the dusty archives of an old professor's while working on his thesis. While he tended to read through anything remotely related to Liyue with an obsessive sort of hunger, the near-raving quality of the work had especially fascinated him — though, unfortunately, to little avail, given the lack of fanfare the paper must have received, its author an unknown.
Still, seeing the great beast for himself — the teeth, the hands — Zhongli supposes he understands, now. It was a strangely arresting sight, with its broken structures, the boarded-up gorges, clawed into the earth. A gutted animal, he couldn't help but think.
A great, high-pitched whistle sounds from their train, and the Chasm’s peaks and valleys disappear behind the clouds of smoke it breathes out, darkening the skies like an omen. Rattling about on the tracks, the engine pushes forward, continuing its ascent to the Harbor.
Hu Tao, lounging across from him with her characteristic insouciance, cracks open her long-cold samosa down the middle, digging out the potato filling with single-minded focus. Per usual, the hollow shell is pushed towards him, which he endures.
Their former Akademiya classmates had nearly all come to bid them farewell, as they left for Liyue, and bearing gifts to boot — books and clothes and rugs, and a veritable feast of snacks that Hu Tao had slowly made her way through over the course of their journey.
“Not nervous about returning home, are you?” she asks, glancing up at him from under the brim of her hat, eyes crinkled with mischief. She tended to wear it everywhere — even with her Akademiya robes, which at least made her easy to find in crowds.
Zhongli wonders at his own feelings on the matter. He’d dreamt of Liyue for decades, in sleep and on the precarious edges of Sumeru’s winding streets, gazing at the stretch of land before him, wondering if that alone could somehow render it more reachable.
After longing with such fervor, for so much time, the closer he came to attaining this dream, the more impossible it felt. Could the Liyue he wished for even be found?
“Do you find me nervous?” he asks instead, taking a bite of his half-a-meal.
“I find you very stone-like,” Hu Tao muses, “which is probably pretty close.”
Not an inaccurate assessment, he accepts. Still, nervousness seemed all too straightforward, even juvenile.
What he feels, truly, watching the golden landscape rush past, could only be likened to whatever odd apprehension those miners must have felt, heading into the depths of that ancient mine: fearing that there was nothing worth finding but an age-old reminder of a thing long-gone, feasting on long-held dreams.
•—–❖—–•
The first few weeks in Liyue sprint past, as fast as life in the Harbor; entirely uncaring for those it leaves behind.
His homecoming does not unfold so pessimistically, though so too does it fail to provide him with the certainty he seeks. That is not to say his heart does not lurch, with the hopeless sensation of falling in love, headfirst, the moment he sees the sea from the Harbor; from a little alcove of stairs, tucked at the edge of a farmer’s market. The granite steps under his feet were so warmed by the sun he could feel their heat through his shoe soles; Hu Tao, ahead of him, had urged him to get a move on! but then he supposed the scene was nothing new to her. How the sea stretched before them; bluer than the sky, glittering as though the stars, fist-crushed, had sunk into its depths.
Yes, Liyue was beautiful. Liyue was, Zhongli understood instantly, even before that moment, home.
Still — home left him wanting for answers. Whether it was helping Hu Tao air out the rooms of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, or standing in patient sojourn for a table to free up in Wanmin, there remained a certain sense of lack.
Not an emptiness, per se, but the sensation of something missing. Often, he found himself walking through streets he had never been in before, and feeling as if in a dream, half-remembered. He had been awake long enough for the substance of it to leave him, but there remained, still, the sensation of forgetting.
Forgetting, Zhongli thinks, something he should not have.
But even this half-fulfilled wish of his was better than nothing. Regardless, Hu Tao required his assistance, though she put up a good show of otherwise. Wangsheng was evidently a source of joy and grief for her, neither of which he felt should be borne alone.
Nor the sweeping discontent a shoddily-performed last rites inspires. Liu Jianjun's funeral is a sparsely populated affair, and an awkwardly unemotional one to boot, save the mourning lady his party had scrounged up their savings to invite. She knelt by the coffin now, her stooped form shaking through wretched sobs, grieving the loss of one gone too early; a son leaving the world before his mother.
Zhongli had, offering her some water and his sympathies, explained sotto voce that it was best they not be kept for too long. The Harbor's humid summers would do little good for the body, and the poor young man had drowned, no less. Her face had pinched at this, a bit — finding him callous, or vexed at her wages, cut short for the day.
Now, he and Hu Tao stand towards the back of the room, watching the grim-faced mourners pass her handfuls of mora one-by-one. She, accordingly, weeps eulogies on their behalf.
"When the Millelith have a word with them, they aren't going to care that the body's already been buried," she mutters. It was rare for her speak at all during funerals, and so waspishly, but circumstances being what they were…
"Perhaps they are relying on the possibility of a cover-up," Zhongli suggests, glancing between them and the ceiling fan overhead. It continues its tiresome rotation, and dispels very little heat.
Hu Tao lets out a thoughtful noise. "A slipshod funeral for a slipshod inside job," she says, as though compelled by the idea.
Liu Jianjun's party — more accurately, his Millelith squad — had nearly knocked down the doors of Wangsheng at early dawn, carrying with them his body, already cold from the waters. They had all a haunted look to them, but insisted that he'd lost his footing during a patrol close to the harbor, and never emerged. Of course, there had been no storms lately, and it was rare for children of the Harbor to be less than capable swimmers, but he certainly had the appearance of someone drowned. Most would not want to contradict men with rifles strapped to their backs, besides.
The proceedings go on, perhaps, for another quarter-hour; enough for the sun to seep into the room, golden and unforgiving. The sweetened notes of the incense, nearly stifling with the weather, burn into ashes. Their smoke trails wind through the air, sometimes drifting close to the remnants of the joss paper's, but like shy lovers, never meet.
The pallbearers arrive as he's passing Hu Tao a new set of incense-sticks to replace the exhausted ones. The room empties out, as swiftly as expected from a people who had asked for a burial as quickly as could be arranged. They trail after the party until Wangsheng's courtyard, but no beyond.
Hu Tao shields against the sun with a palm, her hand swallowing it up whole from its perch in the sky, the highest it will get today. It is only when the procession is entirely out of sight, that she holds out to him, with little ceremony, a kongming lock, fingers locked between the pieces jutting out.
Zhongli accepts it, though warily. It is made of stone than wood, curiously; a heavy, cold weight in his palm. No longer in situ, making it difficult to date exactly, though it certainly appears aged. Not a precious stone, but still heavily carved, to make for a functional puzzle. There was a hollow give to it, as though doubling as a safe.
Ancient Liyueans — well into the Late Archonian era; those strange millennia where there was a universal acceptance in Teyvat a seven-deity pantheon, despite the cultural and geographical distance between all nations — did revere a god of stone, but he had never heard of offerings made to him in his own element.
A luxury good, perhaps, like those old Fontainen manuscripts, inked by hand, all unique in their make, prized over the uniformity of the printing press for it — ?
This is the mark of our pledge, and it is also my challenge to you.
Zhongli blinks.
"…everything else on him they promised to deliver to his family — apparently they've retired to some village in Chenyu Vale — but this they refused to take back with them," Hu Tao surmises.
Given its appearance… "I suppose most would feel uneasy carrying with them a dead man's stolen loot."
Hu Tao sighs, with the great heaviness she prefers when the matter is in fact rather unimportant. "Ai, if only everyone were as scrupulous as you, my dear junior!" (Hu Tao was a prodigy who had entered the Akademiya at a much younger age than most, and enjoyed lording the fact over him immensely.) "No, no. Our clients were rather convinced this little toy is haunted."
Zhongli arches a brow. "Do you concur, Director?"
"Well." Hu Tao shrugs, turning on her heel, and shouldering open the doors to the parlor. Zhongli follows. "If there's a ghost in here, they're doing a good job keeping things tidy. I can't sense much at all!"
"…I see," he says, though the answer leaves him wanting for satisfaction. "Would you mind terribly if I held onto this in the meanwhile, then?"
Hu Tao glances back at him; lingers, how scalpels do against skin, wondering at the place of incision. Then, all at once, she turns away, offering him a dismissive wave — "As long as you take care not to get possessed!"
•—–❖—–•
The Millelith do make an appearance at the parlor, only a day after the funeral, though little comes of it. Liu Jianjun had been acting strangely not long before his death — shaken, fretting — though all evidence pointed to his death being an accident. The only thing of note found, when they exhume the body, are traces of seawater in the coffin.
Hu Tao is called to oversee the re-burial, and ensure the body is truly laid to rest.
The kongming lock remains on Zhongli's desk; neither given up to authorities, nor taken apart. On occasion he slides the pieces out halfway, clacking softly in resistance, but no more.
He never hears the voice again, but the lilt of the tone finds its way to his dreams. In them, he tries to conjure a face for her; like ruined watercolor, it never maintains form. Very little does, except the field of flowers they stand in, blooming in blue.
A life spent in Sumeru, and years dedicated to the Vahumana Darshan alone had acquainted him with the secret niches of Teyvat's past, and their rebellion against scientific explanation. The Archons; their war-wrought thrones, and the blessings they would cede to their chosen. Spantamad records pontificated on Visions for thousands of years, yet, if they did exist, they had long been lost to the faded illustrations in those texts.
In truth, there had been little reason for Zhongli to leave Sumeru. His life there had never lacked for warmth: either the sunlit, meandering pathways of the Akademiya, or the many professors who sympathized with a young orphan with an empty past and an appetite for knowledge. All these things he had always been grateful for, but there remained, always, an unending longing for a home. That place where the earth must know his footsteps, and from where he had been carved out like an excision. The stitches would tear open time and time again, and like gore the desire to go back would pour out.
On those days he would linger about the lonesome artifacts from Archonian Teyvat, queued like soldiers in the shelves of the museum he'd interned at; angled away from the sun, safe from fading. He remembered them still: Al-Ahmar's ancient stone slates, sanded down by time, the long-necked, gilded gulabpash, and, a corridor off, a moon-round jade plate inlaid with trishiraite. The result of Liyuean and Sumerian trade, the plaque by it had estimated. When held to the light, it would quit its opacity, and let the rays sift through its surface.
They had all been displaced from their era and homes, all remnants of some place that was so far out of reach it might as well not exist. In this he thought they were very alike, and so always felt a great deal of camaraderie with them.
Perhaps that was why he had kept the lock, and why it had now become a staple on his desk — enough for Hu Tao to tease him about reducing a ghost to a paperweight (which was better than teasing him about withholding evidence, he supposed).
Yet now that the investigation had shut down, there remained no misplaced sense of morality keeping him from solving the puzzle.
It was this he wondered at instead of the inventory for the following day’s funeral, which Hu Tao had joined him in his office to discuss. By his desk they shared the light of a kerosene lamp; a little sputtering ball trapped within glass, smeared with evening light from the windows.
“If you stare any harder, it might start sweating,” Hu Tao says, pillowing her arms atop her stack of paper — invoices for flower arrangements, cancelled and reordered as a result of Mrs. Xie’s sons’ tendency against unanimity — to tip over, with a finger, the lock. It quickly regains its footing, and finds itself dangerously close to their shared inkwell in the process. “Did you end up figuring out where it’s from after all?”
Zhongli retrieves both before anything should come to pass. “One might argue that to solve a mystery is a murder unto itself — not of men, but of possibilities.”
Hu Tao regards this reply with bewildered contempt, but nonetheless humors him. “No better time to be at a funeral parlor! I’ll even make it look like an accident.”
While her loyalty to her friends is worth commending, Zhongli finds the reassurance alone isn’t enough to move him. If asked, he wouldn’t be able to articulate why he hesitated — but the object brought to him a strange comfort, one that eclipsed its mystery. More than solving it, he wanted to keep it.
He was no stranger to sentimentality, but this was most unlike him. There seemed something duplicitous in seeking answers regarding his past, but monopolizing this puzzle — the discoveries it might entail — for himself.
…even if, he thinks, that voice had felt so very familiar.
“In truth, I believe this lock is rather in need of your Haravatat literary inventions,” Zhongli says, passing her a sheaf of papers — Hu Tao makes a face, but he continues on before they find themselves caught in familiar debates. “It certainly appears precious, and the motifs are reminiscent of the Geo Lord’s, but besides that it is difficult to place.”
Hu Tao makes a show of surprise. “Our departed customer was cursed by the Geo Lord? What a muddle-up of aesthetics — drowning’s not very Geo at all.” A beat. “Unless you do it with concrete shoes on.”
Zhongli concedes this point to her, and, though finding some of the evidence against it pseudo-scientific, considers his own theory, and the lock, again. “Perhaps it could reflect an earlier understanding of him, or a regional difference in worship — a bit like the interpretatio remurium of him in Chenyu Vale, incorporating him into the local pantheon if as a foreign entity. There is the less likelier possibility of a connection to a deity beside the Geo Lord, but the Archonian era’s uniquely consistent polytheism raises —”
It seems that our journey together has come to an end.
As for that stone dumbbell, forget about it, would you?
No, thinks Zhongli, so vehemently it surprises even him. The words register strangely as a betrayal, like a knife between the ribs. To forget, he thinks — a terrible punishment, a curse posing as salvation! More than that, a farce — it was not in his nature to forget, and for this reason alone that plea would —
It would…
Like the tide, the feeling retreats. Rather; the memory of it does. Zhongli tries to grasp the red-hot sensation of it, and finds his hands closing around nothing. Like the tide it leaves its mark, or an inflammation in that gouged-out space within his chest, that lifelong emptiness he thought he knew intimately. And what a foolish thought: how could he? Only now, in the wake of that brief, incandescent moment of rage, or grief, or, damn it all, whatever it was, did he understand the vastness of it.
It was terrible. It was so massive he felt he couldn’t breathe before it — that the void of it was greater than him.
All his life, Zhongli realizes, he had been starving. This brief taste extinguished none of the hunger, but acquainted him with it all the more. How could he go on? How would anyone?
“...aiya, there you go, making that face again,” says Hu Tao, softer now, her brows slanted in sympathy. “Your silences are worrying enough on their own, but if you fall into them mid-conversation I’ll worry you’re having a stroke! Really, if there’s something bothering you, you should — wait, what are you doing?”
“Solving a mystery,” he says, taking the lock in a hand, pinching a piece between his fingers to slide it out proper. The mechanism of it interlocks and comes apart with surprising ease, considering its age, though he still inches it out with great care. There was an odd haphazard arrangement to the individual pieces, as though someone had left it halfway solved. “No better time, as it were.”
The lock is built around a little depression at the centre, shaped like a box, around as much as two fingers’ width; made of the same stone as the lock, though, cradled by it, and thus untouched by the elements.
It is empty.
Under the lamplight, a set of muddy fingerprints line the inside of the depression, as though in a scrabble to obtain whatever had once been within. Helplessly, Zhongli traces over them, as though this might bring him closer to whatever he’s lost out on. They flake off under his touch.
“...well,” says Hu Tao, breaking the silence, finding her voice where disbelief meets humor. She leans over, heads bent together. “Seems someone in Liyue’s got you beat at puzzle-solving.”
•—–❖—–•
“It wasn’t Jianjun, I know that much,” says Mao Weimin, seated atop one of the crates at the docks, only barely audible above the lively din surrounding them; fishermen hauling in their catch, a sailor breaking a fight between his men. He keeps casting uneasy looks at the kongming lock, loosely held in Zhongli’s hand, as though it might soon grow teeth. It makes for a rather incongruous sight, from a well-built man dressed in Millelith-ochre. “He’d carry that — thing around with him everywhere, but he never brought up solving it. If he could’ve, no one would’ve heard the end of it.”
Zhongli and Hu Tao exchange a glance. They had long gone and exhausted all other options — the other members of Liu Jianjun’s squad had outright refused any questions, and given how Mao Weimin’s expression pinched a bit in the wake of his own words, it was likely the only thing that had brought him here were some unresolved compunctions regarding the whole matter. Guilt, perhaps, but not a murderer’s, he didn’t think.
“Is it not possible he had chosen to keep whatever contents were within to himself?” Zhongli asks. From this angle, the sun shone right into his eyes, blotting out Mao Weimin’s face into implication, set against the brilliant blue sky. Even so close to the ocean, the cresting afternoon heat made itself known.
“I sure would, if it sold at a high price,” Hu Tao says, leaning in like a conspirator, glancing over at Zhongli in some farcical display of checking if she might be overheard. “Goody-two-shoes over there would probably want to donate it to a museum.”
“Private collections tend to be hostile to the archival of history,” says Zhongli, winding her back. “But I know not many share my views. Was Liu Jianjun that sort?”
Mao Weimin shrugs. All three of them press their legs firm against their perches when a group of men pass by, dragging, with ropes, a wagon heavy with a load of sacks, its wheels creaking at each revolution. A few more join in from behind; their strong, sun-browned hands making easy work of the task.
“Any money’s good money,” he says. “But Jianjun — he was just a kid, you know. Shows off the new toys they got to the whole neighborhood. Annoying, maybe, but that’s how kids are.”
Zhongli cants his head to the side, holding up a hand to look at him through the paltry shade his fingers provided. “Were you fond of him?”
“...not exactly.” Mao Weimin’s face scrunches into a grimace. “Like I said, annoying. But no one deserves to go out like that.”
“‘Like that’,” he echoes.
“No foul play, if that’s what you’re thinking.” His gaze slides off to the sea only a ways off, hungrily lapping at the docks. “Not from a human, anyway. Just that morning he told me he hadn’t slept right in days — kept getting these awful, bloody nightmares he could barely make out.”
Even if Zhongli were inclined to disagree — if there were any evil to the artifact, it had yet to reveal itself to him — he knew he could not provide a satisfactory answer to quell Mao Weimin’s doubts, either. What, after all, could have led Liu Jianjun to the water?
From here, the Sea of Clouds seemed deceptively gentle, rocking the ships anchored into her floor, like a child to sleep. To drown in it, he thinks: deep-blue lungs, full of sea-salt.
“If it’s not him, then…” Hu Tao hums in thought. “Was there anyone he might’ve trusted it with? Or who could’ve taken it?”
…no, rather, real question was — “Where did Liu Jianjun acquire such a piece to begin with?”
Mao Weimin snorts. “That he did say. That Ever-Triumphant Army — all those hired mercenaries from Sumeru and Fontaine and who knows where — caught some double agent from the Fatui in their ranks a while back. Jianjun was one of the men who helped during the arrest. Took a lot, I heard, since the guy put up a hell of a fight.” He gestures to the lock with curled fingers, as if it might otherwise notice and take offence. “Got it off of him.”
“He stole it, then,” Zhongli surmises, though he’d gathered as much long ago, with how well-preserved it was.
“Pocketed the evidence, aye.” Mao Weimin’s tone carries no accusation, but Zhongli’s stung conscience feels the weight of one regardless. “Though I doubt any evidence would’ve saved the poor bastard. Apparently he’d been in the Army for a while — they’re probably planning to keep him locked up until he croaks.”
Which would amount to this particular thread being mercilessly severed. “Where is he being kept?”
The answer to this does not come as readily as the rest had. He leans back to regard the two of them — crammed together on a single wooden crate, Hu Tao on top of Zhongli’s coattails, and he only just avoiding pinning her hair under him. “...nowhere you bookish types should be. Unless you wanna end up like Jianjun, too?”
“I do not,” says Zhongli, “but without assistance, there is a likelihood we may resort to measures that could bring us very close indeed.”
“That work for you before?” Mao Weimin asks, following a beat. “Threatening the Millelith with your own death?”
Hu Tao delivers a swift kick to his shin before he can respond. “My dearest employee just has a very, very odd sense of humor!” This was offensive, coming from her, but she barrels on, leaving no room for a defense: “We’d just like to know where he got it from. Museum cataloguing purposes and all.”
To his credit, Mao Weimin remains as unconvinced by her appeal as Zhongli’s. If not for the circumstances, Zhongli would find some private satisfaction in this, but alas.
“Do you not wish to know what really happened to Liu Jianjun?” he asks.
Mao Weimin’s fingers tighten around the strap of his rifle. “I know someone who could get you in,” he says, haltingly, “but if you try anything inside, you’re on your own.”
They shake on the matter — what could two bookish types possibly ‘try’ in a prison, after all? — yet, privately, Zhongli wonders if Mao Weimin’s prophecy should find fruition sooner than he thinks: the pull of this emptiness like a riptide at his feet, tugging.
•—–❖—–•
“Not that he’s on this side of the border anymore to mind,” Hu Tao says, somewhere in the middle of their trek from the Harbor to the base of Tianheng, “but it is a bit unsavory, invoking the dead like that, to win a guy over.”
Zhongli glances back at her, thinking of a night a year ago in the House of Daena, when she had admitted, whisper-quiet, that her time at the Akademiya was the worst sort of lie: told to fool herself. There was nothing here that Wangsheng could not have taught her, and no want for rebellion that would make her choose a different path from the one-hundred and seventy-seven generations before her.
Really, she’d said, her head studiously bent over her books, I just didn’t know how to be part of a Wangsheng without my grandfather.
Then you needn’t be alone. I will come with you, Zhongli had said, heady at the thought of Liyue, and wondered, later, what sort of lie this was.
“You did not have to come, you know,” he tells her, holding out a hand to take her satchel, which she waves off.
She gives him a strange look. “Of course I did. Or you might start giving suicidal threats to the guys at the jail, too!”
In a massive exercise of dignity, on account of this having been held over his head for the past two days, Zhongli maintains an unaffected countenance, clearing his throat. “I thought I could appeal to his sense of duty as a public servant.”
“A big imagination is never a bad thing to have, dear junior,” Hu Tao says, comfortingly.
The Old Tianheng Yamen is built flush against the mountain’s base, which looms before it like a guardian, or perhaps a jail warden. The other, more human jail warden, Mao Weimin’s connection, meets them at the wicket gate, ducking their heads on the way in. From there, through courtyards rife with activity: men, circled by guards, occupied with mechanical labor, sewing machines rumbling, in tandem, like a great beast; an open kitchen, blasting heat as they pass by.
Their guide chats the whole way through: how strange for that foreigner to have visitors, by people like yourselves, no less, and do keep your distance, xiaojie, he’s already been in solitary for beating how many inmates black and blue!
The cells in Tianheng are built, charitably, in uncomfortably close quarters to each other, and altogether with little allowance for light. Heavy metal latches secure each, extending far enough into their notches on the wall that render them impossible to open from the inside, or one-handed, from the outside.
On the warden’s call a pair of guards drag him in from the cells deeper within — struggling bodily against the weight of two, burlier men, like a hunted animal, before finally they throw him against the bars, handcuffs jangling in protest.
Then, at last, he meets Zhongli’s eyes — and smiles. It is a very genial smile, for the circumstances, how one might at a passerby, or at the shopkeep, after collecting their bags. Of course, it is offset somewhat by his dirty, matted appearance, the bruise high on his cheek.
“Hello there,” he — Ajax, former captain in the Ever-Triumphant Army, dismissed in disgrace, per the warden’s extensive description — says, carrying forth the pretense.
“Hello,” Zhongli ridiculously echoes.
The smile unfolds at the corners, into eye-crinkling amusement. “You’re definitely the most polite visitor I’ve ever had,” he says, and, giving him a thorough look-over, adds, “Well-dressed too.”
Zhongli glances at the warden, standing behind them. It would be difficult to speak plainly with him as a sentry over their conversation, but to dismiss him outright would only raise suspicion.
He kneels by the cell, curling his fingers along the bars. Ajax’s eyes follow him, though he remains unmoving. Zhongli thinks of the rishboland tiger he had encountered at a dig, once: the lazy lash of its tail; a predator’s certainty, knowing that ceding the first move would not keep it from victory.
“Have you forgotten me so quickly, my dear?” Zhongli asks — then, adds, lowly, in Snezhnayan, “Play along.”
The languor vanishes. His spine straightens all at once, the haze — the pretense at it, Zhongli thinks — clearing from his eyes. He kneels opposite to him, curling his fingers parallel to his on the bars.
“Of course not,” Ajax murmurs, gentling his voice; or warming it, perhaps, like the low simmer of fire over spun sugar. His hand finds Zhongli’s, the spaces between his fingers. Absently, Zhongli notes a callus on his second finger, a strange bit of toughened skin he tests the texture of on instinct. “How could I ever? It’s just been so long that I thought I might be imagining you to keep myself from going mad.”
Zhongli takes care to bite back any expression. “I’m here now, aren’t I? How thin you’ve gotten.”
His newly designated, fate-torn lover has only just begun assuming a suitably pitiful expression when the warden lets out a flustered noise. “Oh, I — well, Weimin told me you wanted to see him, but he didn’t say — well! Not that there’s anything wrong with — I’ll just give you two a moment now.”
He departs swiftly. Hu Tao’s valiantly-held composure dissolves all once into a fit of giggles.
“You may let go now,” Zhongli says, in the interest of clarity.
He snorts, but complies, handcuffs clinking. “Definitely the most interesting visitor, too.” Indeed, he regards Zhongli with novel interest for it, as Zhongli does him. Siniy, he thinks of his eyes, that bluer-than-blue unique to Snezhnayan; what storm-dark seas and bruises are. “Are you with the Fatui? Did Kliment send you?”
Based on his (admittedly paltry) knowledge of the Fatui — Snezhnaya’s once glorious military, now reduced mostly to extinguishing its own frequent civil wars — Zhongli had his doubts about a rescue ever arriving, but it still pained him to disappoint.
"I'm afraid not." He glances over at Hu Tao, who takes a moment out of her fit to dig into her satchel for the kongming lock, dropping it into his hands.
“...ah,” Ajax says, arching his brows, “Well, how did that end up with you?”
“Through rather unfortunate means,” Zhongli says by way of explanation, before once again setting at the task of sliding out each piece, clicking out of place — until, at last, the lock reveals its hollow interior.
"...it's empty?" He leans back, mouth twisted. "How disappointing."
"It is disappointing indeed," agrees Zhongli, "though for me more than you. Tell me: what was inside?”
The accusation fails to have palpable effect, at least aside from inspiring some subtle mirth in his eyes. Ajax lounges back, hands set flat against the floor; stone and an array of dried footprints, looping about, like mementos from old inmates. "Quite a reach, xiansheng. How many hands could that thing have changed before getting to you?"
“Only one, and by now they are unfortunately within a coffin,” Zhongli replies, not missing a beat. This finally catches him off guard, blinking in surprise. “What was inside?”
“...a map,” he says. “And some sort of gemstone. It was cracked when I found it — I didn’t get a good look at it, with the guards breathing down my neck all the time. Hey, does it really lead to a treasure worth killing people over?”
Zhongli elects not to correct this misconception. “That remains to be seen. Where is the map now?”
Ajax makes a great show of pondering this, glancing skywards in thought. “Mm… I do wonder. The lack of fresh air has taken a toll on my mind, you know? Maybe getting to see the sun beside my sweetheart might clear the cobwebs up there.” Then his gaze abruptly snaps back down, hooking itself to Zhongli’s like a thrown spear. “Get me out of here, and I’ll take you wherever that map goes myself.”
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The warden is terribly sympathetic with Zhongli’s plight — perhaps uncomfortably so — but a crime cannot go unanswered for.
“Even if the Ever-Triumphant Army is all foreigners, they still swear their loyalty to the Millelith,” he says, shrugging helplessly. “Betraying that isn’t so easily forgiven — and frankly, young man, have you not heard the things they say about the Fatui? Are you sure you’d want to throw in your lot with one of theirs?”
“The heart, regrettably, wants who it wants,” he says, with resignation. Hu Tao stifles a cough into her fist beside him. “Might I at least be allowed to say goodbye? I do not know when I can visit next.”
The leave is given, with the effusive enthusiasm of a romantic, which Zhongli is grateful for. He is, after all, not one to admit defeat so quickly.
“Would you stay here?” he asks of Hu Tao, once they exit the warden’s office; a tidy alcove built close to the jail gates, evidently meant for receiving visitors who would not want to overextend their stay.
Hu Tao tilts her head at an angle, nearly dislodging her hat. Zhongli straightens it by the brim.
“Wouldn’t want to disrupt a lovers' goodbye, I guess!” Then, clever beyond her years, as she always has been, she adds: “Just don’t make it so festive I end up needing to visit you here too, alright?”
Following this, Zhongli starts a riot.
It is, in his defense, not a very large, or extensive riot, nor one which should last longer than the day. In a way, it is not even he who contributes to its spread beyond the initial spark: informing a group of inmates, whilst the guards have their backs turned, that the warden planned to set the Snezhnayan free, in exchange for a treasure map in his possession.
“I only seek to inform you of this,” he says, furtively, “for he has something of mine he refuses to give up as well, and so I fail to see why such a man should be let off scot-free.”
“That two-faced bastard probably drew the map himself!” one of them exclaims, slamming a fist down against his sewing machine, which whirs in protest. “As if he can leave in three months when we’ve been here for years!”
“Aren’t you just bitter they kicked you off kitchen duty ‘cause he does a better job?”
“I used to be a chef, goddammit!”
“Yet,” Zhongli wonders aloud, standing, “perhaps I have been too hasty. Would not the warden be at fault, here, for listening to such a man at all?”
From there, the fire spreads, and very fast. The idle chatter between the inmates shoots upwards in volume and discontent, given yet more strength by old misgivings surfacing. Long, thankless hours of labor, the warden’s deaf ears to complaints, the beatings — until, at last, when a guard comes in with his baton to attempt defusal, the first punch is thrown.
Zhongli navigates around the periphery of the chaos as it further devolves, and as more guards rush into the fray. As he finds the turn of the corridor leading to the cells, he sees the warden — brought in by the commotion — laid low by a stray swing.
When at last he reaches the solitary cell, immediately getting to working open the heavy metal latch, Ajax stands with his face pressed to the bars, as if to chance a look at the racket outside. “What did you do?” he asks, with visible delight.
The cell door swings open, the noise disguised thanks to some especially loud profanity from far off. “It seems I have gotten you out,” he says, holding out a hand. “Now, will you take me there?”
Ajax laughs, a charmingly boyish sound; takes Zhongli’s hand in both his cuffed ones. He had thought it earlier, too, but how strange still: for how long he must have been in this dark, cold place, his hands are still warm. “I’ll take you wherever the hell you want.”