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Ajax is fourteen when he first wields a bow.
He doesn't particularly want to. There are hilichurls in the abyss in his first month of running and hiding - he can deal with hilichurls. He can deal with the dance of the Abyss mages as they cackle at his terror, at the fact that he does not understand anything they say but knows they wish for something worse than his death. He slashes and hacks and stumbles his way through floors that seem to whisper with the weight of history, a weight too great for him to bear or even understand.
What he cannot deal with are Ruin Guards.
He had never seen them before his fall, only hearing of such machines in the ruins vaguely when he was on the surface. He barely remembers the first time he runs into one — only that it starts spinning, it hits him in the face and keeps going. He wakes up battered and bruised and nursing a broken bone that keeps… healing itself. Tying itself together, no matter how much he attempts death. It won't be the first time he's tried to throw himself off a platform, or see what would happen if he got electrocuted. Nothing is there — nothing except the great devouring deep, and soon he resurfaces once more, his Hydro Vision shining in the darkness.
It is after one of these bone-breaking-morphing-reshaping failures that he runs into Skirk. She's as alone as he is, carving a bow out of some strange wood that hasn't seen the light of day in years. When he touches it, it feels like the rot will creep into his very skin.
She's the one who tells him to use it on the Ruin Guards.
She doesn't tell him how, of course. Skirk is his master in every sense of the word in that last, unending month in the Abyss. She kills him again when he dies, so it sticks. Every failure sticks.
Ajax learns how to mold daggers with his Vision instead of rusted metal, and learns how to take out shields with one shot with his watery pole-arm. He kills with one shot, one thrust of sharp spiked knuckles outwards. He wishes he had a Cryo Vision out loud, and she laughs at him.
"There is no salvation once you've been to the Abyss, boy," she says, "not even if your Vision keeps you alive. You can earn the Tsaritsa's favor, but you can't keep it. The Gods are not for us, and to become stronger in the Abyss, you must pay a price. Strip away the weakness, and embrace your strength instead of your fears. And once given, you can only take your price back with something of equal value."
"What price?" he asks, with all the wonder and ignorance of a fourteen year old that doesn't know better.
"What does a runt like you own? Your heart, of course."
Those words ring in his head when he claws towards the surface, when she forces his head down into the pools to make him understand the value of air when he tries to kill himself again.
After the seventh time, he finds that he no longer wants to — that he can breathe, even with his lungs full of water. Ajax would have broken down — cried — a month ago. He no longer can.
There are no Vision holders in the Abyss. There are those that perished, and those that didn't. Those that turned into monsters, as everyone eventually does. It is why Ajax perishes in the Abyss, and what emerges is something that crawls out of the rotting, weak shell of his former self, that decimates Ruin Guards without help, without the choking fear of the things themselves that rooted deep into his being. Until they are nothing but smoldering machines of a forgotten era in his wake.
He hollows out his heart and fills it with the chill of water lapping at every edge of the Abyss, unending depths that send him back up again and again, back into the nightmare.
"Up on the surface," Skirk says, when he struggles with the bow, "they tell you to aim fast, aim true and aim for the heart."
She laughs at the face he makes in response. "Funny, right? We're all liars, every one of us, and none of us have one."
Ajax never learns how to use a bow, and she never corrects his stance. He never beats her, doesn't even come close.
He only asks her why once, and she shrugs.
"We learn from experience, runt," she tells him. "The one who teaches you how to wield a weapon knows best how to hurt you. You don't want me to dunk your head in water again, do you?"
He doesn't. He never asks again.
He leaves the Abyss behind and is folded into the foreign warmth of his mother's arms, shaking as she embraces him. He still feels the chill in his soul, colder than the Snezhnayan air that rattles his bones, colder than the Vision the Tsaritsa could have blessed him with.
He feels the heart he left behind, the price for the power that hums in his veins.
(Whatever he loves shall be destroyed.)
The Cryo Archon, her Majesty, sees right through him when he is brought before her, her unseeing eyes passing judgment, the grief palpable in her very being. She knows about his heart, and she does not pity him. She judges him, and finds him wanting, and does not leave him bereft.
The Gods are not for him, he thinks, in awe, but she can create a world where that doesn't matter. She asks him for help, like he is significant, and not broken.
Tartaglia is seventeen when he becomes her weapon of war, the vanguard of destruction, and the Eleventh Harbinger.
(It's a relief that he delights in destruction.)
#
Liyue gives him a new identity that he takes to like a duck to water.
"Sunsettias sold mid-morning are never ripe," Zhongli tells him, and takes the offending fruit from his callused hand, holding it with his own firm, smooth ones that look like they have never stepped outside of a nail salon to demonstrate what he means. Childe understands very little, and his mind wanders when Zhongli leads them from stall to stall, pausing at every one to examine fruit and grass and sprigs of green garlic with the same diligence that he gives to the quality of jade.
It is such a simple thing, to slip his hand into Zhongli's, and to let himself be led on. There are no protests, no quizzical glances, and the world narrows to a quiet existence that cannot last.
It does not last, of course. The girl who waits outside the Scent of Spring raises her eyebrows at him, and his trepidation almost overpowers his courteous, smiling mask.
He endangers Zhongli every time he's seen in public with him. And Zhongli — simply does not seem to care about the fact that his reputation might be ruined. Just as Childe had forgotten himself, for a split-second, that what he plans to do might lead to the ultimate destruction of this beautiful city.
What is he doing?
For a moment he desperately wishes to understand what he would feel here, if he could.
"Hey, xiansheng," he ventures, pulling away, "Do you think -"
Zhongli looks at him, and Childe takes his words back. Zhongli has no doubts, he realizes — all his actions are deliberate. He does not do something as mundane as thinking when he knows.
It does not help the blush on his face, freckles vivid in the dying light of the sun, the shadows cast by the Jade Chamber long settled over the harbor. He coughs and looks away, and Zhongli takes his hand again.
Childe is twenty and there are alarms ringing in his head to tell him he's fucked up, there are concerned Fatui members at his door waiting to give him their reports on the adepti, there's a strongly worded letter from Signora telling him off and a man at his side waiting to be escorted to dinner.
A man who looks at him like he's not a monster incarnate.
"Shall we go?" Zhongli says.
I'd follow you, Childe doesn't say, wherever you go. But I can't.
Happiness does not belong to people without hearts.
#
Tartaglia is twenty one when he watches the Jade Chamber collapse into the sea, an old God crushed under its weight, and an hour older when his nonexistent heart sinks far, far, beneath his chest cavity. Crushed under the weight of his lungs, under the certainty of what he always knew.
Tartaglia aimed for the moon, and he missed. The bow was never his strongest weapon, after all.
He remembers Skirk's faint, mocking voice that now rings in his head that he had actually trusted someone to teach him. That he was led around and paraded like a fool because he gave Zhongli the weapon and told him to stab him himself.
Zhongli doesn't look at him. Doesn't even acknowledge him, or his near-destruction of Liyue, as anything more than his game of chess.
He tells himself that the pain he feels is from overuse of the Foul Legacy. He tells himself that, over and over, as he pushes himself into work before eventual deportation, as Teucer comes to visit and is sent away, as he tears apart half-written letters to his family about a man he'd like them to see.
The conversation with Aether is one he constantly broods over in his head.
"Those Ruin Guards," he'd said, and then hesitated. "Relics of a bygone era. I've found them in the domain of the God of Dust. Like... like they were her toys. So Teucer wasn't far off."
"Fitting," Childe had replied involuntarily, his smile as brittle as fired glass. "The Gods delight in what causes mortals anguish."
"That's..."
"Hm? Do you not agree?"
"Sometimes," Aether says, "we hurt people we love, without meaning to. But you said it yourself — an apology can fix that hole in your heart."
Childe does not tell him that he functions without the semblance of a heart beating in his chest, that it was the first sacrifice he offered to the Abyss. How the absence of it may have been the only thing that didn't kill him, to do everything he's done.
To bear everything that's been done to him.
The pile of gifts, never given, in the corner of his room, continue to pile up before he leaves. He places the jewel from a Ruin Guard's eye on top, and packs his bags.
He tells the inn staff to deliver any oddities to the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor before he leaves for the ships, and does not dwell on what it means for him.
What it does not — will not ever — mean to Zhongli.
#
Whoever he expects to find at the end of the world, with the Tsaritsa's war making the world collapse like cards, it's not the Prince of Khaenri'ah blocking his way, like he's not destined for damnation himself.
Of course he's not here for a fight, not really, only to wear him out before the Traveler inevitably gets here, with his companions of choice on the day of the apocalypse.
"No hard feelings," he tells Alberich, as he draws his daggers out, too impatient for bows. "You're doing this for family, yes? Or perhaps... something more?"
That hits a nerve, he can tell. Perhaps he's not the only abandoned bastard in this abyss without a home, heart ripped out of him when it never really was in his chest to begin with.
They stand at the brink of destruction, exchanging the last blows on top of that high platform, and he watches the Prince freeze himself and fall, fall, fall —
— into a running redhead's arms, his smile inscrutable when the other man panics and begs for him to wake up, like he's not bleeding out the color of his hair all across his clothes, seeping into black. The Ragnvindr heir screams, the sound echoing across the icy pillars of this level of the Abyss.
[Get up, fuck, you can't leave me, not like this -
Kaeya! KAEYA!]
He says nothing as the traveler holds the man back from tearing at his throat, floating away. Alberich should've seen him coming, just as the Princess of the Abyss should've known better than to think he would stand idly by as the world he knew fell apart.
"Wait," Aether insists, holding Ragnvindr back from collapsing onto the other man. "Give me more time - I'll get you out of here. I promised you, didn't I?"
Ajax laughs, his chest hollowed out. "Glad to see you too, comrade. But you're wrong. Anyone who was born - or shaped - by the Abyss, must return to it."
Aether's eyes tremble, and he remembers the Princess, how similar yet different the two of them look, the haunted expression that never leaves her face. How she, too, knows that all things in the Abyss must meet their end, that neither of them were bound to Celestia.
How all of them in this tableau live out their personal tragedies, a caricature of the life they were meant to lead. Golden eyes affix him in place, but these new ones are not Aether's.
They are familiar and old as the dead moons in the sky.
"Ajax," Zhongli says, and he can hardly believe he's here. "Do you not want to be free?"
"What's the price of my freedom, Morax?" he asks sardonically. His traitorous heart beats out of his chest, and he restrains it still. He was not destined for soft hearts and softer gazes, and neither of them fit him still.
Tartaglia squirms under those eyes, a pinned butterfly on the wall.
"Mine," Zhongli says. He looks at him, steadily. "Will that do?"
Tartaglia's mouth goes dry. "What?"
Zhongli holds up his gnosis, shimmering in the dying light. "She had no more use for it," he says. His smile is sardonic. "Apparently a god's heart, willingly given, cannot be taken by another."
The implications of it barely hit him before the Abyss opens up in front of Zhongli. The gnosis dissipates into the vortex, hungry hands clawing at it, and Ajax watches it slip shut. The ice pillars fade, and all he can hear is static, before they are back in the wooded forest of the first level, away from the palace of illusions. One step closer to stopping the war.
A war he's not sure he wants to fight anymore.
Faintly, he hears the sobs of palpable relief in the background, the weak voice of a Prince thawed out and alive and unwilling to understand. Unwilling to believe how Ragnvindr's Vision has dimmed, like anyone wouldn't be willing to pay such a price.
One that pales before what has been done for him.
"I told you," Aether says, and the pixie beside him chirps along.
"I have been told," Zhongli tells him, "that you keep your promises too."
Oh. "Oh," Ajax says. "Yes. I do."
He can feel the heart regrow itself, and gasps in pain when it hits, memories flooding back in, each more intense than the last. Emotion, he thinks, dazed, the white-hot pain of it blinding him.
#
The world doesn't end, though he's pretty sure it's supposed to. Aether's haunted look is embedded into his eyelids when he stops it from happening, severing him from the one connection he has left to his former life. He's on the sidelines for most of the fight, impeded by his injury, but neither of them bring it up. He's had quite enough fighting for a while.
There's no use for a weapon of war when his master's incapacitated, and if Aether's right, that will be the case for a very long time.
Aether wonders out loud if he did the right thing, sitting next to his bed. Tells him about the multiple gnosii he had collected to stop the Abyss from devouring Teyvat. About the ultimate sacrifice of separation from his sister, who had decided to stay behind to look after her people.
"Don't ask me, comrade," he says. "Still getting used to having a conscience."
Aether almost laughs. "Maybe spend some time with that heart of yours, idiot," he says, directly looking at Zhongli coming into the room while wiping a hand across his eyes, and Ajax wonders how Aether will deal with the loss of his, whether the bits and pieces that other people fill in for Lumine will ever be enough.
He wonders if the bits and pieces of himself, stitched back from the heart he left behind in the Abyss, will ever be enough.
Zhongli is quiet when he fusses over Ajax's wounds after Aether leaves. Ajax takes the moment to scan the room, and stiffens when he sees the long-discarded gifts that were supposed to be in his inn room, all arranged around the bedroom of this little home. A scarf that he had bought lies neatly folded on the table, well-loved.
Loved. His heart swells, and even if Zhongli doesn't return his feelings, now that he knows he has them, it's —
Zhongli looks up at the muffled noise that leaves Ajax's throat.
"What is it?"
"Does it always hurt this much?" To have a heart? To have emotions chokeslammed into you, after decades of it simply not existing?
"I've been told love hurts a significant amount," Zhongli says, like he's announcing the mail. "It is the topic of many plays in Liyue, and in my experience, it is accurate enough." His eyes wander down to the bandages wrapped around Ajax's leg, which he begins to tend to.
Ajax swallows down his jealous reflex. He has no right — he has no right to ask Zhongli anything at all, not when he knows now that back then — "I'd have traded the world for glance back from you, xiansheng."
Zhongli looks up. "It is fortuitous, then, that you do not trade in much of anything." His lips twitch with humor. "And that you have my full attention."
Ajax stares at him, face steadily growing as red as his hair, gaze arrested by the soft heated pink of Zhongli's cheeks and ears. He realizes, rather belatedly, that he may have misread some things.
#
Ajax does not get to map out Zhongli's body entirely before he falls apart in his arms like crumpled paper, curling in and overstimulated. But he knows now which is the bit that makes Zhongli whimper, the bit that makes him bite down on his hand and muffle the sound against the kiss that Ajax bestows on his lips.
He is all long limbs and long, winding hair that he twines under his hands and brushes across his face, this funeral parlor consultant. The man he loves. The man who gave up his gnosis for him.
He blinks open fuzzy eyelashes, dark opening to bright. Ajax's piecemeal heart hurts. He lifts up one leg and drives in, taking ruthlessly, and Zhongli opens like a flower for him. A sunsettia picked at sunset, ripe with juice. A qingxin on the cliff, the bitter petals of his mouth bringing him down from the high.
"My former master," he says in the aftermath, "used to say the Gods wouldn't be our salvation," He laughs a little, breathless, as Zhongli still squirms under him, pulling Ajax back inside, uncaring of the spend that leaks out and stains the sheets under both of them. He wonders at the motion, before realizing it's meant to be reassuring. "It's a little funny, in retrospect. I must have tried to die so many times in that place before I decided my heart was forfeit if I needed to survive."
"Hearts are fickle things," Zhongli tells him quietly, his voice gone hoarse and raw. "But people are constant, even when their heart is unwillingly taken."
"Mine was willingly given, xiansheng," he coos, moving the slightest bit to see the range of expressions on Zhongli's normally implacable face. "What happened to yours?"
"A smug rascal took it," Zhongli replies, arching up into the touch, "and never gave it back." The flush extends down his chest, and Ajax watches, mesmerized. "But your master was right, after all."
"Pardon?"
Zhongli lets go of the sheets to cup his cheeks in his hands, and Ajax stills, watching him smile up at him, hair haloed behind him like he had never imagined in his wildest dreams.
"The Gods might not be for you," he says, voice softer than it's ever been. "But I hope a man like me, as mortal as he can be, is enough."
Aim fast, or aim true, he wonders. Aim for the heart.
He leans down to kiss Zhongli, "It is."
Perhaps he'll get Zhongli to teach him how to wield a bow, whenever he feels up for a fight again. It's been a while since he went hunting for Ruin Guards.
Ajax is twenty four, and in love.