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Childe doesn’t go visit Zhongli until it’s almost too late. 

And contrary to what Signora implies, with every turn of her snide words, it’s not out of some frivolous sense of betrayal he feels towards the former Archon of Liyue. He has more than enough grace to appreciate an elegant plan in action, and being in the Fatui makes traitorousness not much more than an everyday annoyance. And this one has mostly left him in one piece, so he doesn’t have much reason to grouch.

What Signora fails to realize is that what Childe dreads is the betrayal that Zhongli must feel from him. That’s the reason. 

That’s the only reason. 

Childe had arrived in Liyue Harbour just about a year ago; the plum blossoms that line the streets of this ocean cradled city had been in full bloom, and this is what his first memory of Liyue is: fuchsia dusk slyly slipping into the first blushes of indigo and purple, starting to turn warm at the edges with the evening fires and the salty-sweet-spicy scents of stew and soup and oil that he had no names for. That night, he had walked back to his quarters, a little tipsy from the sweet chilled huangjiu and the heady scent of plum blossoms, sweet-warm. 

He had told this to Zhongli once when they were having one of their impromptu dinners at Wanmin restaurant—and watched the consultant’s usual mask of solemnity peel back, just a little, enough for Childe to understand he was pleased. Childe had felt unreasonably elated—even if the pleasure was directed at Liyue, he had reasoned carefully, it had been at his perspective of Liyue. 

A week before he plans to depart to Snezhnaya, Childe decides that it cannot be put off any longer. Signora has finally left, and he knows that the foulest of her underlings have left with her. There is no more reason for her to devote her particular energy to Liyue; the gnosis has been handed over, the contract has been fulfilled. 

“I suppose I can trust you to wrap up here, Tartagalia?” She asks him before she leaves, honey-sweet with her success and her condescension for him. “Don’t make a mess trying to settle your score with the—” Childe almost crows when she has to catch herself from saying Archon, “With Morax.”

“Didn't you rob the gnosis from Barbatos’s chest?” Childe asks, idly cleaning his nails. When it comes to his colleagues, Childe usually restricts himself to complete mistrust and vague dislike, but it's difficult to keep his acute distaste for her under wraps. “Messy, wasn’t it?”

She stares at him for the measure of a full breath, her pale cataract-blue eyes filled with unsubtle threat. Childe wants to turn away, take the pleasure of blithely walking off and ignoring her, but that is not an option that he can consider. She is not be disregarded—for she is not only highly favoured by the Tsaritsa and decorated amongst the Fatui, but also infinitely dangerous on her own right. Childe is confident in his abilities, and an essential one of those is identifying the strength of his opponents. 

“This is a different situation,” She snipes icily. “I hoped all that education had taught you to appreciate that, but perhaps my optimism is misplaced?”

He smiles at her with sweet malice. He has done what was asked him, followed his goddess’s dictum to the letter, unknowingly or not. He has carried his colors well, has been the well-crafted weapon his Archon has designed him to be—and Signora always chafes when Childe performs his role well. The knowledge that she had been stealing his thunder is perhaps the only thing that protects him from one of her own tailing him in his last week in Liyue. 

The next day, the day after he finally has worked himself up for it, Childe walks through the dappled evening shadows. The day dies in dips and dashes around him, a falling brightness. The dwindling of light and sneaky chill on his nose are the first hints of the turning of seasons, the slow encroachment of autumn. He keeps to the most deserted back streets and bridges, winding his way down narrow stairs and shady alleys, watching the sea shimmer brass and blue under the setting sun, the clouds flaming cherry-pink. The air is wet on his face and salt-sharp at the back of his tongue. Childe thinks he might miss this.

In the last two weeks, while he has made discreet donations to undo the damage their actions have caused Liyue, Childe has stuck mostly to his rooms in the Northland Bank compounds. His room is spacious and has a balcony large enough to accommodate a party of five for tea, but Childe’s blood has always flowed quick and fast and open, and his feet ache in the confines of his house. However, the Fatui had to make a show of punishing their youngest Harbinger, lest they lose their most valuable clients in Liyue. 

“It’s been formally declared that you had acted on your own,” Signora had informed, her eyes flashing with suppressed glee. “In defiance to the Fatui policies in Liyue and to the Tsaritsa’s will. We have negotiated with the Qixing to allow your punishment be decided internally. There will be some deductions to your bank account, and of course, a suspension.”

“Who’s idea was that?”

“A bit of my prodding,” she had said. “And Ningguang was very much ready to put the blame squarely on you. Have you offended her?”

“I’ve met her once.” He had met her when he had first arrived in Liyue. He's not often intimidated by people, but the Tianquan of Liyue is not someone he hopes to cross to path with again in any capacity. Like all predators, he has falcon keen senses that warn him when another was nearby.

“I suppose you were the most convincing scapegoat,” Signora had mused, a smirk sticking to her mouth. “Well, no matter now. All things are in order. Enjoy your holidays.”

They are most certainly not. But he had nodded, and she had traipsed off, to his relief.

When Childe knocks on the door of Wangsheng Funeral Parlour, the lamps are coming on, their light still pale and young. It is the Director who answers the door. She looks the same as always, exuberant to the point where she conveys the impression of physical weightlessness.

“Childe!” She chirps. There is no enmity in her expression, so Childe lets his shoulders soften. They had been rigid ever since he had Wangsheng in his sights. “Looking for Zhongli?”

“Yes,” he smiles his best one at her, and her face lights up with mirth. Childe is often not sure if Hu Tao is laughing with him or at him; either way, he doesn’t mind. “How is Xiansheng?”

“Broke,” she snorts, and he cannot help giggling. “Did he tell you he forgot to set aside mora for himself before he decided to retire?”

“Are you surprised?” Childe quips back, more than a little surprised at her casual display of a secret that Signora has assured him must be kept at the cost of death. It dulls the shock of hot and painful things crawling in his chest. He thinks of saying Xiansheng didn’t tell me because, well, Xiansheng hasn’t seen me since he told me that he was Rex Lapis, who, by the way, I was trying to kill and steal a gnosis from this whole time. Also, why do you know? Why did he tell you?

“ Nope, ” Hu Tao sniggers. She gestures him to come in. “You know where to find him.”

As Childe climbs the stairs, he wonders if he should be more worried about his reception. If the legends are true, then Rex Lapis had made his name by winning the title of Archon—which means that Morax had always been horribly strong, even before, winning a seat in Celestia and a gnosis. Childe’s nature is to follow the path of most resistance, to push against rocks until they are forced to shatter—and his mouth has an annoying tendency to run free. As Osial had flailed in the sky, he had thought inanely, so this is what Archons are, this and more, and his plan of battling Rex Lapis to take his gnosis had seemed so exhilarating that he would have laughed if he had been in less pain. And then, he had gone challenged Zhongli—a burst of rage and resentment for being bested. By this air-headed consultant who has turned out to be one of the Seven and Signora.

Zhongli had looked away, mouth a straight, thin line, and Childe had wanted to drag his opaque gaze back, make him look only at him. How blasphemous. And now, Childe is here, uninvited and possibly, unwanted. He had, after all, attempted to wash Liyue harbor off the map and then challenged the Martial God to a fight. He wonders what Zhongli's wrath might feel like, whether it would hurt like rendered earth and violent sun. It twists his insides with something like hunger, but not quite.

The memories swirl, dark and viscous, somewhere between his throat and his chest. The bitter black sea rising, the taste of his own defeat like blood on his teeth.

The room, as always, is quiet and a little too warm. The late afternoon sun falls in steep slants over Zhongli and draws out the dusty gold of the air, the burnt clay browns in his hair. Childe had known what's coming next, but even so—like every other time, he is left with not enough breath, and an empty lurch in his chest; it infuriates him. He is wearing his usual bespoke, intricately embroidered suit, his hair done up as always in its ragged elegance. There is a piece of Cor Lapis that he is running his fingers over as if in conversation. It is the same shade as his eyes and the trailing ends of his hair.

All things are in order.

It is so familiar and painful that Childe thinks of turning away and leaving; the heavy weight of all that was and is and would not be makes him want to hug his knees and sink into the floor. How agonizing it is to have this particular facet of knowledge: Zhongli is eternal, immortal--time, perhaps, is not even real to him unless in vast quantities. He thinks in centuries. But Childe is mortal, and even a year is a long time for him. And now it’s gone without warning, as mist under the sun. It’s not that Childe was ever under any illusion that his time with Zhongli and Liyue had been borrowed, an act of divine grace from the Tsaritsa, but. But. It hurts in a way that it shouldn't; their warm, meandering days coming to this, slipping into heavy shadows.

Zhongli’s other hand rests on the desk, palm open like a rudder in the wind. Childe thinks of the broad strokes of grey and brown amongst blue that is Yaoguang Shoal, the whale’s back in the sea. Shaped by these very hands. The tall, strange pillars-mountains of Huaguang Stone Forest. Spears thrown with a flick of those hands. The first time he had touched those hands gloveless, he had met calluses on the tips and the palms. It had felt forbidden in the strangest way; he had been expecting the soft, smooth hands of a scholar (at least that's what he thinks scholars' hands are meant to be like).

“Zhongli-xiansheng!”, he calls out, ignoring the flutter of his tongue. 

Zhongli turns to him and gives him the eye-smile that Childe has known so well. Childe knows the degrees of it like he knows the tiny creaks of his fingers, the flex of his hydro rushing under his fingers. He knows when it means Zhongli is pleased for bringing him to the tea-house by a lily pond, and when he's content with only browsing the harbor, taking in the brine of the sea, a little wet from the humid breeze. The tilt of the eyebrow indicates the token embarrassment of bringing no mora—a tiny trail of heartbreaks now.  

It loosens him a little to see this smile of greeting. It also makes him heavy as the sea-bottom. 

“I came to say bye,” he chirps noisily. “I’m leaving next week, given there aren’t any more storms. ”

There is a starburst of surprise around Zhongli’s mouth. He blinks, and Childe steps forward to rest his hands on the cool desk, the way he always does when he is here. From this angle, Zhongli’s eyes glow as clear as the dissolving day. 

“I did not know you were planning to leave so soon,” Zhongli says. His fingers are still wrapped around the Cor Lapis. It gives a dull flare, which makes both of them look down at it."I was under the impression that you enjoyed Liyue."

“I mean,” Childe smiles. “I have to, sooner or later. Sooner seems to be better, considering the recent events. Not exactly a person the Qixing wants to see right now.”

“Ah. Have they been bothering you?”

"The Fatui have officially taken the position that the summoning of the Lord of the Vortex had been an independent act," Childe shrugs at Zhongli's narrowed eyes. "They can't obviously claim responsibility--The Qixing would completely lock them out of Liyue. I'm going to be disciplined internally."

Zhongli looks pained, and despite himself Childe wants to wipe it away from his face. "It is most regrettable that you were so inconvenienced while only following orders."

And being your pawn, Childe thinks, the words throbbing under his tongue. He reels himself back in and breaths out a small laugh.

“It's fine. It's more or less a holiday. I'll get a some time to spend with my siblings.”

Zhongli nods, his eyes shuttered. Childe taps his feet against the wood of the floor. He is lost for words, and this state is a new thing, a new beast, and Childe doesn’t want to be caught by it, but he is. He wants to ask, didn't you want to seek me out in these two weeks, Xiansheng?  Didn't you--didn't you miss me--

He doesn’t. Instead, he stands and fidgets awkwardly. Shakes his foot, while Zhongli seems to come to a decision. 

“Then we must have dinner,” he says, and if Childe is right, there is a lick of wistfulness to it. "Where would you prefer to go?"

The expansive feeling in Childe’s chest rises like tidewater, and he thinks of all of these over-wrought emotions swimming in the hollows of his body, filling the emptiness of his skull; wasted.

But he can still have this. He can remember this last time; gild it and frame it and then leave. This is it; the end of this year of magical thinking. 

He nods, letting his own smile spill all the way to his eyes. 

Childe had met Zhongli in his third week in Liyue. He had seen Zhongli in his second week, walking back from the kite-shop, and recognized him instantly—Zhongli had been infamous among Liyue's merchants for his questionable possession of mora and Childe was good at listening to market gossip. Zhongli, enigmatic and beautiful in a way that made Childe promise jokingly, but not that jokingly to Ekaterina, I’m going to go talk to that man. To himself, he had said, I’m going to get that man.

Come next week, the next time he had seen the flick of amber-tipped hair, Childe had followed him straight to the middle of a strange scene where Zhongli was attempting to buy a pair of noctilucous jade earrings carved with the elemental symbol of geo without any actual money. After putting that one on the Northland bank tab, they had walked to Wanmin restaurant for Zhongli’s treat that Childe had paid for. In the days that followed, he mostly tagged along with Zhongli, slouching a little with lively casualness, so that the shopkeepers were relaxed enough to humour Zhongli’s purchases and Childe’s questions. An added bonus had been that Zhongli tended to expand on various myths of Liyue while pondering over his purchases, and Childe had figured out that his knowledge was good as any renowned historian and any number of books. He had thought the entire venture had been quite productive—he could collect information without seeming overtly suspicious and spend time deciphering this man. 

It had been a strange, delicate dance, learning to eat with chopsticks that Zhongli wanted to gift him, so Childe had bought it anyway. Zhongli’s strong, thin fingers around his own, a liquid warmth pooling all over his insides. Listening to the rambling history lessons with the sweet alcohol on his tongue and sweeter accidental presses of their knees under the tiny table. The quiet evenings that made him almost too beautiful to bear and full of odd, elliptical reasonings for actions that Childe couldn't understand.

Childe is not good at wanting things, because they tend to get stained with blood by the time they fall into his hands. But he had let himself slip just a little, not enough to hurt anyone, just enough so that when he sleeps with someone else, he can comfortably imagine their eyes shine gold.

If he survived Osial, Childe had thought deliriously, in those last, wild moments, he was going to kiss Zhongli. 

It is an odd irony, a displacement to think that over the last year they had sat next to each other, and Childe had plotted meticulously how to obtain the gnosis of the Geo Archon. Those plans had all gone to waste since the Geo Archon had miraculously and suspiciously died at the Rite of Descension. He had suspected all the wrong things--he should've spared more thought to the convenience with which a perfectly functional and replicable sigil of permission had appeared, despite being something that they had only traces and fragments of. He hopes that the killing intent and the ill wishes hadn’t severely upset Zhongli’s health. If mortal wishes have any effect on celestial beings, that is. 

How had Zhongli felt that Childe had been here to plot his death and the potential ruin of what he had built for Liyue? How was Childe supposed to feel about their friendship (if that even exists) and the fact that Zhongli had grown over Childe like a strange song, had allowed himself to be wrapped into Childe’s daily thoughts and businesses, had known the ending all along? How much of that was intentional, this slow melding of routines, so now Childe is left with an unsteady sense of time and restless feet?

In the first three or four days, Childe had wanted to scream a little every time he thought about any of this. But that’s the thing about Zhongli, Childe had thought peevishly, it’s not very difficult to forgive him. In the end, he decides that all things are in order, and resigns himself to the comfort of the thought that one day he would take on Zhongli in a one-one all-out fight. That comforts him for the next two days, but then Zhongli still doesn’t call him to pay for some ludicrous things he had chanced upon in some derelict pawn shop. 

That’s when Childe decides that Zhongli must be angry at him. At the end of another couple of days, that runs out too. 

They decide that they will have dinner at the Wangsheng parlor, since Childe isn’t winning any popularity pageants at the moment, and he thinks there is a quantifiable risk of Xiangling actually impaling him. Zhongli agrees. Wanmin had taken damage in the storm. 

He already knows what he wants, so he sits back and waits for Zhongli to decide. He knows what Zhongli is going to order—meat rolls, jasmine tea. Childe gets the Calla lily seafood soup, some plain rice, squirrelfish, and a jug of huangjiu.

They chat slowly about the Liyue Harbour and the repairs that need to be made, carefully circling away from their roles in it. They do not bring up the Golden House or the Jade Palace.

Childe doesn’t want to talk about these things at all—he is not sure what exactly that he wants to talk about, but it’s not the rising cost of bamboo and ironwood. He wants to ask so many things, and most of those things feel like they won’t make their way out of his mouth. Zhongli is edged in gold as always, sharp-eyed and a little more cautious than usual. It is a warm enough day that he has slipped out of his jacket, and he looks softer somehow, dressed in an ash-grey shirt and a charcoal waistcoat. Childe wishes he would take off the tie. 

“How have you been?” Zhongli asks as he is opening the jug. "The Traveller told me you had fought her, and it had not been an easy fight."

Childe pauses to wince. “Not bad,” he replies, popping the stopper off. “I had a few scrapes here and there, but you know. I get banged up pretty often.”

“That doesn’t seem good for your reputation as a Harbinger.”

Childe brings a hand to his chest in mock outrage. “Xiansheng, I do fight quite a lot of strong enemies!”

“You bother foolish treasure hoarders in empty ruins,” Zhongli shoots back, and Childe laughs. He does do that. Liyue Harbour isn't exactly teeming with delinquents, and the Fatui are careful to keep a low-level, mostly economic presence here. 

“Some of them do have Ruin guards!” He protests. “Don’t you remember that time when we went to get that weird blue mushroom for Xiangling, and there was that flying Ruin Guard?”

“Ruin Hunter,” Zhongli corrects him. He had only watched Childe fight that time; later had praised his technique and speed. Childe had thought he was protecting a civilian. Zhongli had probably been taking the measure of him, judging him to see how much mayhem he could cause. 

Good enough, he thinks acidly, but carefully bottles himself back inside. It can be a compliment if he wants it to be. How many people can claim the honour of been judged worthy enough by one of the oldest Martial Gods to be an opponent to test his beloved nation?

Dinner comes; the Ferrylady graciously sets the low table on the side for them. They face the balcony as they eat, watching the low, distant looming clouds that frame the mountains, the glowing firefly lights of the city. There is a heavy edge to the quiet that follows, an anxious turning in his stomach that Childe ignores. 

Even then, he is aware of Zhongli as he unfailingly gets, as if all the tiny parts of him are rapt in attention, waiting for the sun. Like always, his eyes trail the smooth movements of Zhongli’s hands and he feels stupid and angry at the hot skin under his collar. 

“I’d have come to see you sooner,” he blurts out. 

Zhongli doesn’t raise his eyes from the teacup. “I assumed you didn’t want to.”

I always want to see you, he thinks a little helplessly. 

“I wasn’t sure,” he says. “How you felt about everything.”

“Quite relieved,” Zhongli replies, sipping. “It has gone quite well. The collateral damage is not also as high as I would have expected.”

“Yes, well, it was a good plan,” Childe concedes, wincing inwardly. “And it did help that Lumine was here too.”

“Quite so.”

“What about the Adepti?”

“Their contract is with Liyue Harbour now.” Zhongli turns his head slightly. “Were you concerned about the city?”

Childe doesn’t lie. “Somewhat.”

Zhongli smiles with his whole face this time. Old habits die hard, Childe thinks, praising Liyue Harbour is like praising his child. Perhaps, it is. It has been built on the back of his stones, out of the bone of dead gods felled by his hand. 

“So Liyue is as godless as Mondstadt,” Childe observes. “Well. At least the Monstadters can jibe right back now.”

“I suppose,” Zhongli says, stroking his jaw. “That particular insult is currently to be exclusively dispensed by the other five.”

“With Snezhnaya taking the lead.”

“The Tsaritsa does have devoted followers,” Zhongli murmurs. There is the tiny bite of an insult there, but Childe has been so riled up lately that he can’t say if it’s imagined or not. He ignores himself and focuses on laughing. There is a beat as he pours out some more wine, and then Zhongli angles his face towards him.

“How do you feel about everything?” Zhongli asks, taking a delicate bite of the meat roll. His mouth is a bit pursed.

“Not enough matsutake?”

“A bit too much. Also, I believe that they used those which only simulate the hint of pine—they don’t actually harvest them from pine forests. It is a bit bland on that note.”

“Oh? How do you even find these things, I don't know.”

Zhongli turns his luminous eyes on Childe. His heart skitters. 

“So, how do you feel about everything?” He repeats. The set of his mouth tells Childe that he is not allowed to dodge.

“Well,” Childe says, covering his mouth as he takes a bite of the squirrelfish, fingers nipped stinging with heat. The oil and spices bite in the soft of his cheek. He wipes the grease discreetly on the napkin, a smear of gold and red. “I’m glad to not have failed the Tsaritsa. I wouldn’t have liked that. I almost thought I did—agh.”

Zhongli turns away, but Childe sees the darkening of his eyes. 

“And I’m also glad Liyue Harbour is mostly intact, and there have been no fatalities,” he goes on to add hurriedly. 

Zhongli nods and chews the meat. He does everything with such an exacting and quiet grace that Childe used to find funny until he had pulled on his gloves, after examining a jade comb and Childe had felt fireflies flutter all over his stomach. 

“Your rice will fall,” Zhongli chides, and Childe eats it before it slips out of his shaky grip. His tendons still start aching after only a little time when he eats with chopsticks. There are a pair of pure jade ones in the locker of his cabinet that he won’t probably get to use in a long, long time. 

The silence that settles over them as they eat is an unfamiliar one—it threatens to drag Childe into the treacherous waters of memory. He is not a person who often indulges himself with retrospection but today his thoughts spill out without direction, burrowing into corners that he prefers to leave alone. 

“We never went to Nantianmen,” he says, without thinking. 

Zhongli blinks. “Oh. Perhaps we can go when you come to visit next time.”

There is an explosion in his chest, dark and viscous and incandescent, carves its teeth into the soft insides. Childe grits his teeth so hard that pain rings all the way up to his eye bones and the piece of rice and fish fall out of his chopsticks onto the table with a soft thump. 

Zhongli stares at him, his eyes toneless. 

“Do you really think I’m going to come back to see Nantianmen, Xiansheng?” Childe asks softly. He clenches his hands on his thighs. The chopsticks are daggers in his fist.

“I only thought—”

“You thought of so many things, though, Xiansheng,” he snaps. “What were you thinking about when you thought it would be cool to let me hang out with you? I mean, it’s not like you really wanted money because you’ve got this place footing the bill—and what does money matter to you, anyway. What does anything matter to you.”

His voice rises—all the wrong words, everything coming out wrong the way it always does when he is this mad. But he can’t stop—it’s as if he had finally sent the boulder on his chest rolling down the slope. His muscles feel frozen, and he can’t even turn to look at Zhongli.

“And I’m sure you could’ve figured out how to string me along without the friendship act.” He finishes, half-shouting at the open balcony. “So, unless the Tsaritsa wants me to come here to this fucking place for something else, I’m only coming back for the fight you fucking owe me. ”

Silence. His heart beats like a forge hammer at his forehead, and his fingers are cramping. Like breaking a spell, he manages to reach for the huangjiu.  

“Childe,” He hears Zhongli say. He takes a swallow. He turns to face Zhongli. 

Zhongli’s mouth, once again, is only a slash. There is an expression that Childe has never seen, a pinched thing that hollows out his cheeks.

“Childe,” Zhongli says again. He has laid his chopsticks down by his bowl. His hands are knotted together. Another new thing. “I owe you an apology.”

“I don’t want your apology,” Childe says viciously. “And what does it matter now? It was my mistake, I suppose, to be so presumptuous. it's fine, Xiansheng. I'm sure you're good with forgiving mortal mistakes and such, so it's all fine. It was my mistake.”

Childe isn't a person who normally holds a grudge, ask anyone. More often than not, he's uncaring, and sometimes, when he needs to, he soothes himself some good food, good alcohol, a good fight, a good fuck. He understands this better than most people that he knows: that life is simple when broken down into bare units. Childe prides himself in enjoying it, rather than steep himself in sourness and trickery most of his brethren does. Petty and small-minded, he likes to think of them.

So sitting with a former god and begrudging him for not returning his regard for him when Childe's very presence in Liyue was only for playing an actor in his elaborate play is not something he should do. But his anger swells like a ship sail in the wind, and horrifyingly enough, it's not even the needle-sharp battle-rage he's used to feeling. The closest thing he has felt to what he's feeling now, this fist-clenching, tongue-biting, dull red thing, was the time when the first boy he had ever kissed had pretended not to know him later. That had been a decade ago. He doesn't even remember the boy's name or face.

Tsaritsa, this is embarrassing. This is, in fact, a new low of embarrassment for him.

Zhongli opens his mouth and shuts it again. A wet wind drifts from the harbor, and it brings the sounds of the people chatting on the bridge, the grumbling sounds of shopkeepers. It also brings Childe back to why he had decided to come here today. 

His anger cools, congealing like slime condensate left out too long. It spreads slowly through, chilly and grey, and it aches. The sourness in his mouth is not softened by the sweetness of the wine.

“Zhongli-xian sheng,” he says tiredly, suddenly exhausted, the red shimmer of a headache starting to grow over his left temple. “I’m sorry—I didn’t come here to fight you today. I thought we should bid our farewells properly—it’ll be long before we see each other again. Let’s just eat.”

Zhongli wears that pinched expression as Childe drinks the huangjiu.Then he, too, turns away--his expression evens out, but his eyes remain dark and murky. The stinging only grows in Childe’s throat, wrapping tight and suffocating his vocal cords. 

They eat in silence that gathers like shadows under a crypt, and Childe’s stomach churns. 

Once while dining, when Childe was just learning a terrifying truth about himself--that he would rather sit and listen to Zhongli and talk to him about the myriad cultural and historical tapestries of Liyue than fuck him fast and hard and easy (Tsaritsa, he could only imagine the curl on Signora's lips), Zhongli had asked what Snezhnaya was like. 

“Really cold,” he had said, and Zhongli had frowned a bit, and Childe had remembered that he didn’t like reductive descriptions. So Childe had described how the first thing you saw from the ship was the wall of ice, rising like a whale out of the ocean—blue-white, glittering like a Cryo vision. The black, sheer walls of the ridge that led to the harbor. The cold air which slices your lung and makes you feel clean and blessed. 

“Ah,” Zhongli had said. “I must visit some time. It sounds beautiful.” And Childe greedily had thought of them strolling side-by-side in the city crowned by snow, the taste of fire-water in their mouths. How would fire-water taste on Zhongli's tongue?

He remembers it still, the twilight descending long and blue all around them. He had still been unused to this phenomenon of Liyue, when at certain times of the year, at a certain time between the blazing end of a day and slow creep of the night—there is a period where everything is intensely, perfectly blue. Unbelievably, the light itself was blue; and it wrapped around Zhongli like a shroud, a bewitching figure in a silent, liminal space in the deep reaches of the ocean. His eyes shone gold in the gloaming, and between Childe’s ribs, in that bloody place where almost no one was allowed, there was a huge, unnamed thing pressing, pressing, pressing. 

“Walk me back to the guesthouse?” Childe asks. The food is almost all eaten, and the rest of it is cold. The air in the room is thick and sticky like Liyue Harbour's wharf in the height of summer; none of them had actually spoken much, other than a brief inquiry that had died before it could ripen to a conversation. A line has been crossed; Childe thinks they had both done it, and like most ugly realities, the only way forward now is to push through and hope that you come out of the other side and still recognize yourself. 

He offers peace because he’s weak—and a little tipsy, a little sad. He’s never really been lonely here in Liyue. It's such a rattling feeling. 

Zhongli’s back softens. His expression is smoother now, but he holds his hands stiffly, with a heaviness that Childe has never seen in him. 

“Okay,” he says softly. Childe wants to smile, but it feels like overcompensation, so he doesn’t. 

Instead, he leads them away from the guesthouse, from Wangsheng. They walk through the orange shadows that the lamps make on patterned stone, through the thin staircases and close-by porches of houses.

They end up by the ocean, on the wooden walkways across the square where Xiangling’s restaurant sits. The square's mostly deserted and dark, the windows of the shops shuttered. 

Childe rests his forearms on the railing and leans forward. The air is cold and wet. It makes his tongue unglue itself a little. 

“Would you mind standing here for a bit?” He asks. 

“No,” Zhongli says from his right. 

Are you humoring me? He almost says then but catches himself. No more, he thinks wearily. He would reserve the fighting for their arms and spears and bows. The grey chill grows in his heart, worming through his veins. Childe wants to lie down where he stands.

He turns his head; Zhongli is looking at him. 

“I’m not making you late for something, am I?” He asks again, half-joking, half-petulant—late is something you are if time is a limited commodity, a marker to pin it down and remind you that it’s unspooling around you, even as you breathe or sleep; Zhongli is not fenced by such concerns. 

“No,” Zhongli says again. This time he slips his hands in his pocket. “Childe, if you do not want an apology, will you accept a gift?”

“Oh, man,” Childe grins up at him. “Xiansheng, what’s the occasion?”

Zhongli doesn’t smile. “The occasion was meant to be reconciliation. Now, it’s a gift for your departure, and hoping that you have a safe journey.”

His thoughts scatter. 

“Reconciliation?” he sputters a bit, pulls himself up.

“You did not visit for two weeks,” Zhongli says, quietly and carefully. He watches Childe’s face so intently that Childe feels an inane wish to wipe at it. “In the Northland Bank, it seemed you were under the impression that I befriended you only as a means for my end. I wanted to tell you that’s not true.”

My end? Childe thinks it’s such a bad choice of words—Childe thinks that he’s on a cliffside, with the wind on his back—Childe thinks he might drown in his own blood. What’s true then? What’s true, what did you want, why did you—

“You’re apologizing,” He manages through his closing throat. 

“No,” Zhongli says, and then he looks a little lost. “I just wanted you to know I always thought of you fondly. Regardless of what passed between us.”

He holds out his hand before Childe can catch that line and tug it unknotted; in his palm, there is a pendant. Childe sees the blue glitter of noctilucous jade, dulled slightly by the translucent gold of the amber that encases it. 

“Qingxin?”

“Yes.”

The cord is textured and warm under his fingers; he feels the intricate weave of fiber that makes it up. There is a fine tremble in his hands. 

“What is this?”

“It’s made from the wildwood flower plant,” In the silver shadow of the night, Zhongli is washed out into beautiful, severe lines—a figure cut from jade and given breath. “They grow in some of the glades on Huaguang Stone forest.”

“Oh,” Childe says, a little wildly. His chest is a forest of brambles, pierced all over with thorns. His wrists are alive with blood. “Oh. Hu Tao won’t be pleased, why did you spend—”

And there is that ugly, murky flare of envy.

“She need not worry,” Zhongli says, still careful, as if he's holding a glass bauble. “No money was spent. I gathered all the ingredients myself, and crafted it at my leisure.”

Childe looks at the pendant in his hand, the jade in the center of the amber, shaped into a Qingxin. At the woven cord. 

“I didn’t know you knew how to weave,” he says. 

“It is not very difficult.”

Childe closes his eyes. There is a lightness that threatens to engulf his head as if to tear it clean off his body. The cliffside is made of ice, slick under his feet. 

I—

What will he do with this in Snezhnaya, this sad and chocked need, this undying longing? Childe is a person made to be consumed—by battle, by worship, by devotion, by practice—all of which he knows intimately, like the cold, savage snows of Snezhnaya, like the scars that dot his hands. But this is different—this is unmaking, this is renewal, volcanic heat and melting stones, consumption turned on its head. A burning finger trailing over his ventricles.

Zhongli is still staring.

“Xiansheng,” Childe says. He is giddy and light, warm and wretched. He reaches out and takes Zhongli’s gloved hands into his own. There is a beat of surprise from them both, but Childe is far, far past caring. 

He will leave Liyue by the end of this week. 

“Zhongli-xiansheng,” he says again. Zhongli’s face is so still that he can be a statue. Only his eyes flicker, an unnatural gold. 

“I thought of telling you this for a while now,” He cradles Zhongli’s hand gently, like an injured bird. “I thought of it when I was releasing Osial on Liyue. The first day I saw you, I thought of kissing you. I told Ekaterina that I wanted to talk to you, but what I really wanted was to kiss you. And it was supposed to be easy, but nothing actually easy when you get down to it, is it? I never ended up asking you because you talk too much and turns out, I love listening to you. It's not even an exaggeration. I think I will listen to everything you ever have to say.”

The words feel surreal and terribly banal, given form. He’ll be embarrassed by them later. They also feel lovely, molten, and golden in the night air. He is awash with the heat of uttering them, of diving off the cliffside. There is no fear, only the dizzy rush, only Zhongli's wide-eyed glance. His ears burn, but he forges on.

“It’s going to be hard leaving this place. And it’s a little bit because of the food, which is great, and just a bit because of the people, who are all cutthroats. And mostly because I fell in love with someone who turned out to be a god. And then I stayed in love with him even though he lied to me. And then I didn't go see him because I was angry with him. I'm so stupid, Zhongli-xiansheng. But I like you so much, I like eating dinner with you. I like knowing all sorts of random things because of you. I like your friendship--in the bank, when I thought you don't care for me, even as a friend, I was angry at you.”

He's rambling now. Zhongli's eyes are still wide, still fixed on him.

“You don’t have to do anything about any of this,” he finishes awkwardly. “I’m going to leave anyway. We can part like this--as good friends, and if you want, I'll never bring it up again, not even in letters or the next time I see you. I just wanted you to know. You know I love Tsaritsa as my god. I want you to know I loved you as a man—and you’re not a god now, Zhongli-xiansheng, so I suppose I get to love you for a while this way. It's turned out well that way for everyone, right?”

Always, always, always, with teeth and flesh. 

He is picked clean, left white, and naked. His ears are buzzing with his heartbeats. His hands are empty.

Then there are hands cradling his cheeks. 

Zhongli is so close that Childe can see the darker flecks of the gold ring in his eyes, the spread of his oblong, glowing pupils. 

“Ah,” Zhongli murmurs, his voice as warm as evening rain, and Childe drinks the scent of him and tries to compare it all the things he knows—like rain, like spring water. The silk flowers by the lotus pond. He never wants to forget it. “This whole year, I kept wondering how can I be so fond of a man who refuses to learn the proper use of chopsticks, but these things are as they are. We are not rational with our regard.”

Childe laughs inanely in the cage of his palms, strangled and breathless and tipping on the wrong side of believable. 

"Are you--" He starts to say because this can't really be happening. He must have heard wrong or misunderstood something. "Was that supposed to be some sort of romantic declaration?"

"You do not sound convinced."

"You made it sound so convoluted! It sounds misleading, if you think about it. I confessed much better."

"You must give me a second chance then. Later. Now, may I kiss you?"

Childe has a hysterical urge to laugh and then scream. "You want to kiss me?"

"Only if you allow me."

"I'll allow you anything."

Zhongli kisses him like a kick to his teeth. He tastes like water after a long day. Like sunlight on wet stone, a rainbow shower. He tastes like lightning and sugar starting to burn.

There is no sound anywhere, anymore. When he was much younger, Childe had got caught up in the water bubble of a large hydro slime. He still remembers how it felt—a world of water, standing still, all taste made of water, no breaths left. It’s the same, except he never wants to leave. Childe might die if he leaves.

Zhongli kisses him with a rawness and sweetness that sets him aflame and alive, like the glow of battle lust, sends his heart soaring like the spread of a falcon's wing. When they separate, Childe’s chest hurts as if he has been running the whole time. And he had been, in a manner of speaking. Zhongli's mouth looks like it stings, so he leans forward to brush it with his own. 

Around him, the night is the bloom of immortal flowers, a chorus of bowstrings in release, and a silver veil; he is a flowering branch, blooming with ugly, rosy things. He is a revelation under the first rain of the year, the first leaf of spring after a long winter. 

He lurches forward to press his face into Zhongli’s shoulder, chases the scent of glaze lilies and sandalwood into the hollow behind his ear.

“Come back with me,” he begs. 

“Yes.”

“It’s not going to be a one-time thing,” he warns because he can’t help it."You can't somehow god yourself out of this tomorrow morning. I won't allow it." 

Zhongli grins, widely, so unlike himself that Childe chuckles. 

Zhongli drags his tongue over his lower lips like a promise and a demand. Childe pushes him against the wall, slides his thigh between his legs, and kisses a trail from his neck to his ear, teeths at a jumping tendon--Zhongli shudders in his arms. Childe kisses him with heedless want, and Zhongli’s hips arch into him, rhythmic and maddening. 

“Open the door,” he whispers against Childe’s mouth. 

"I'm going to fuck you so hard," Childe garbles, his hands rough and tight on Zhongli's hips. On the waistband of his pants. "I--Are you--too forward?"

"Not at all, I'm hoping you would," Zhongli says so smoothly that he feels a burst of annoyance that he's so coherent while Childe's brain is on the precipice of blowing out due to the lack of blood. In revenge, he grinds down as hard as he can manage, until Zhongli makes a sound that is between a choked exhale and a whimper.

Somehow, he opens the door, and they nearly fall on the foyer. 

They shed their clothes soundlessly and clumsily in the dark apartment, almost tripping over various pieces of furniture. When they reach Childe's room, they fall into bed, still kissing and groping, almost delirious with want and the intoxicating slide of skin on bare skin. In the middle of his bed, Zhongli kneels over him and ties the cord around his throat, and the pendant rests over his breastbone. 

In return, Childe presses a kiss over his inhuman heart, over the deep drumroll of his heartbeat, licks from his sternum to a dark nipple, and takes it into his teeth. Under his hands, Zhongli's thighs tremble. He drags his body against Zhongli’s, and Zhongli drags his mouth across the line of muscle in Childe’s shoulder, wet and hot, and there is electricity fusing with his teeth and nails as if he still wearing his delusion.

They are soon sweat-slick and gasping against one another. Zhongli is so beautiful against his sheets, spilled ink and amber and glowing skin over muscles of a great cat; Childe yearns for him even in the clench of his body, deep in the heat of his flesh. When Childe takes his cock in his hand, hot and soft skin over rigid flesh, he throws his head back, his throat gleaming. Childe's belly clenches, hot with want. He takes a breath just so he doesn't spill immediately. Too much. Zhongli is too much.

When Zhongli comes with a gasp, a breathy, ragged sound, his face twisted with surprised pleasure, Childe strokes him through it. Then he allows himself to unravel.

He takes Zhongli’s hand as he comes, with Zhongli’s teeth buried in his shoulder. He clutches it so hard that he can feel the fine bones grind--but Zhongli holds him back, and he is wiped clean of any fear of the past or the present. 

“Don’t call this a contract,” He says, as they clean one another. He swirls the wet towel over Zhongli’s thighs, his stomach, his cock, between his legs--and everywhere he touches, those coiled muscles jump against his fingertips. Zhongli places feather-light pecks against the expanse of his biceps, the breadth of his shoulders. It raises goosebumps. "It'd sound so unsexy."

“Of course not,” Zhongli murmurs into his skin. “What a gross underestimation that would be.”

Then he looks up to kiss the corner of Childe's mouth, like a fingerprint. 

"I never underestimate anything," he says, low in a way that sends hooks of want into the marrows of Childe's bones."You and me, least of all."

Childe feels his heart stutter even as hunger makes his gut clench. He runs a fingertip up Zhongli’s damp inner thigh, his nerves burning. 

Zhongli bites his collarbone, hard. And just like that, Childe needs him again, wants to devour him again. 

He lays him down with his hands on his waist. Bracketing one of his legs, Childe crouches over him and kisses the soft inside of his thighs, traces the fast-flowing veins with his tongue, follows the long muscles with his teeth. They twist and catch as Zhongli shivers. When he bites, leaving bruises to flower on pale skin, Zhongli doesn’t even flinch, only spreads his legs out more. Childe takes him in his mouth, still only half-hard.

“Ahh--hhh...”

Over him, Zhongli pants harshly, his hand slightly curled in Childe’s hair, a pressure on his neck. He traces the shape of himself over Childe's cheek. It makes Childe so hard that he shakes a little with the pleasure-pain of his cock rasping against the sheets. 

When he is hard and straining and leaking, Childe withdraws and lets it slip out of his mouth.

“That’s rude,” Zhongli gasps under him. 

“I'm rude,” He laughs and closes his mouth over the jut of a hip bone. Zhongli jerks and pushes him away, but Childe holds on anyhow, his fingers bracketing the dips and rises of his stomach muscles, carefully licks it. 

“Are you ticklish here?” He asks, lisping a little. 

Zhongli only squirms under him, expression miffed. He sits up on his elbows, watching Childe through his half-lidded eyes and long lashes. There are bruises on his collarbones and pectorals, brush strokes of red and purple. 

Childe sucks another here, on the soft thin skin, drinks in the salty clean taste of it, and chases it with his mouth to the navel, starts to crawl up the sternum. His hands run all over, everywhere he can reach, while Zhongli’s arms gently map out his back and the juts of his spine, tracing over the scars on his shoulder, breath hitching over and over. 

When Childe reaches the hollow of his throat, Zhongli arches into him as Childe mouths at the narrow bands of muscle on his chest. Their hips lock and press and lock and press, slippery, and hard and scalding; Childe’s mind whites out as if smote with holy fire.

Then Zhongli is wrapping his legs around his waist, the embrace of land around an estuary. Cups the back of Childe’s neck. His skin burns Childe everywhere they touch. 

“Childe,” he murmurs. His mouth opens a bit, slack with arousal. "Childe--please--"

“ Yes, ” Childe manages to slip out, and then time dissolves into a savage, brilliant heat.

Cradling Zhongli with his body, Childe thinks of the silver-pink fresh fish that he’s going to have to get from the harbor in the morning. He has rice and butter in his kitchen. He'll also have to find that herb with a faint minty aftertaste that Zhongli likes so much. He is going to put lemon rinds between their ribs and rub them down with pepper and salt and fry them with butter and that herb. 

“I’ll make fish for you in the morning,” he mumbles into the sharp wing of Zhongli’s shoulder blade. Sleep nips at his heels with gentle puppy teeth. “Like Xiangling cooks it. It won't be smelly.”

“With lemon and pepper?”

“Yes,” Childe tightens his hold a bit. “And rice.”

"Mmm,” Zhongli says, and strokes his thumb over the soft place where Childe's thumb joins his palm. “Okay. Good.”

“Good.”