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Time doesn’t exist to someone like Xiao.
Groggy, he sits by a corner at the roots of the Windrise tree. It’s his favourite place to lie, if not in Venti’s arms, amongst crystal flies that dance around him in greeting when he comes around. There is the occasional hilichurl sighting but most of them are docile and the handful that aren’t, they’re no problem for Xiao. Maybe that’s the problem, that Xiao’s merciless towards anyone, worse that he’d kill a human as he would with an abyss mage or geovishap.
Venti’s gone when Xiao wakes up to a splitting headache and the worst nightmare he’s had by far, the cawing of a passing bird is snapping him out of his stupor. He realises that his arms are warm. He finds painful red gashes stretching across his skin, blood seeping out of open wounds. The soreness in his chest spreads as Xiao lifts his hands. Red, his fingernails stained incarnadine. Xiao gulps, rubbing mucus off his nose with his forearm, eyes worn from crying about something Xiao can’t remember.
“Venti,” Xiao mutters, but Venti doesn’t respond. There’s no gust of wind or a voice cradling him at the back of his mind. A whimper slips out of Xiao’s lips and he retracts. He shrinks into a little thing where no one can touch him. He blinks and in front of him, there’s blood. Xiao shivers, reaching a hand for the corpse in front of him, his victim lying cold with a gaping hole through her chest. Xiao freezes, the sound of her strained, screaming voice calling out a child’s name echoing through his ears.
He covers his ears, stepping backwards with his pupils dilated to half their size. He stumbles, falling over where there’s a dying child under his calves. He is frozen mid-way into a scream, none other than Xiao’s primordial jade leaving multiple gashes across his delicate body.
Xiao tries to raise his voice into a howl but his throat is left itchy and dry, as if his vocal chords have been ripped out and he’d been robbed of his right to speak. Shaking his head in denial, he tumbles and turns, falling headfirst in front of a pile of dead bodies. He looks up, a chill running down his spine and all the way at the top, he sees himself, a version of himself he was sure he’d long left behind.
Xiao grips onto his shirt tightly and suddenly his world has blues and greens again. The muffled sound of birds chirping is somewhat audible to him as the red washes out. When he looks down again, his pants are battered and his shirt is ripped, as if he has lived through the Archon War a second time. His gaze faltering, eyelids heavy with fatigue, Xiao is gone again.
───────
Xiao is awoken to the faint rocking of his body, as if he’s being carried. He furrows his brows, barely able to make out where he is. The distinct aroma of cecilias wafts beneath his nose as he stirs, giving him a better idea as to where he’s being taken. Once he returns to his senses, he starts to recognise the familiar sensation of Venti’s back and finds that his legs are hooked around Venti’s waist for support, arms slung around his shoulders all the same. Xiao lets out a low groan, signalling that he’s awake, nuzzling into the crook of Venti’s neck.
“Where were you?” he coughs out hoarsely, feeling like he could’ve ripped himself to shreds with his own teeth if he had been isolated for even a few hours longer.
“With you now,” Venti replies, mellower than the usual exhilaration he carries in his voice, and rubs Xiao’s hand with his thumb. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he adds, the tail-end of his sentence sounding incomplete as if he means to specify what he did wrong. He stops himself there because he knows neither of them are ready for the conversation—the reality that no one makes it out of the Archon War once they’ve been a part of it.
“Since when could you lift me?” Xiao muses, chuckling meekly. There are only a handful of occasions where he has seen Venti so tense, being the only Archon who managed to keep a smile on his face through the countless wars he has borne witness too. “I was sure those scrawny arms couldn’t hold anything but the lyre.”
Venti pauses for a moment, a smile that is characteristic of his usual self emerging on his face. “I could do it the entire time, you just haven’t noticed,” he grins, prideful.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere special,” Venti responds, giving no proper clue as to where they’re going. With the way Venti has to put extra care into each footstep, Xiao can tell he’s climbing uphill, confirming his earlier suspicions as to where they might be. Looking down, he starts to notice cecilias speckling the grass around them, decorating the dark and empty field with their milky petals. Venti comes to a halt soon after and slowly kneels as an instruction for Xiao to lower himself.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Xiao confesses once he’s on the ground, knees drawn up to his chest and eyes averted to the cliffs’ edge only a few footsteps away from them. The wind blows his hair into a mess, getting it in his eyes and his mouth, but he doesn’t bother to move. There is something different about the atmosphere, like something has sucked all the calm out of the night and replaced it with impenetrable tension.
A rueful smile on his face, Venti says, “You would’ve died if I was seconds too late.”
Xiao knows it’s true. Every time he falls back into the shackles of a nightmare, he is consumed by a force so dark and so powerful that he doesn’t learn of the damage he inflicts on himself until the quiet aftermath of staring into oblivion and wondering what he did to deserve this.
Taking Xiao’s face in his hands, Venti whispers, “I want this day to be one that you remember with a smile.”
Venti traces his fingertips against the hardened scars beneath Xiao’s eyes and follows them down the length of his jaw. He looks at the skin peeling off his wounds, his sagging eyebags and paling skin, taking it all in like an artist admiring his magnum opus . Xiao flinches at the touch, starting to feel panic build at the back of his throat but he anchors himself to the ground, keeping himself steady.
“I shouldn’t have let you see me like this,” Xiao says in a manner that sounds like he’s scolding himself, only seconds away from apologising for a matter that wasn’t in his hands. Venti holds Xiao’s hand firmly in his own, lifting it mid-air so that he can properly intertwine their fingers.
“Did you think I would see you any differently when you’re in pain?” Venti asks him. The Yaksha averts his gaze, gulping because he knows he doesn’t have the answer he knows he should have. Venti’s hand snakes to the back of his neck, pulling their faces together. “There is something I’ve been practising.”
With the hand that isn’t tight around Xiao, Venti raises his hand mid-air. He closes his eyes, devoted, muttering a chant under his breath. Xiao feels the ground tremble, his heart rate picking up pace out of anticipation. When he looks back at Venti, he isn’t wearing the same frilly white top and white stockings he always wears but instead an outfit that he knows all too well. Taking its place is a white-winged costume with a Greek-type toga modestly clad around his legs. When Venti’s eyes open again, they’re a celestial white.
An ocean of cecilias erupts from the ground, covering the field in an ocean of white akin to the colour of his eyes. A gasp slips out of Xiao’s lips as his jaw hangs open in surprise, struggling to make sense of this. When the metamorphosis concludes, Venti lets out a tired sigh and falls against Xiao’s chest, his smile growing when Xiao reaches around his waist to catch him just in time.
“Happy birthday, my love,” Venti wishes, a faint blush dusting his cheeks. Xiao takes a few moments to process the unfolding events. From his back, much like a magician, Venti brings out a bouquet of cecilias. In awe, Xiao pulls Venti in by his face, locking their lips in a kiss.
Venti smiles against their lips, deepening it as soon as he gets the opportunity to. The cecilias turn and hide their faces, facing up to the moon.
“I haven’t had a birthday as good as this one in forever,” Xiao says, tears welling in his eyes. His hands quiver against Venti’s skin, as if he’s terrified of breaking the only gentle thing in the chaos of his existence. Venti leans into his touch instead of shying away from the destructive force that he is, enough love to fill a galaxy swimming in his eyes. He throws his arms around Xiao again and lays against his chest, forfeiting his strength to pretend they’re the only people in the world and lie in his lover’s arms.
Xiao hides his face against the crook of Venti’s shoulder, a ceaseless symphony echoing through the hollows of his chest. He maintains a firm hold on Venti’s body, refusing to break their embrace at the slightest movement. Like this, every nightmare he has ever faced feels more like a paper cut than a septic wound, and realises how his words were never his own, only fragments of the song that his lover, his fiancé, the Archon and everything had given his soul to sing.