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Beidou had known she would eventually end up in Ningguang’s bed the first time she’d laid her eyes on the Tianquan.
There’d been something about the way Ningguang spoke to her, each word felt so languid, so inviting - even as she fines her enough mora that can buy her another ship - and Beidou was a simple person that could not, cannot resist a woman like Ningguang.
The night starts with a few drinks Beidou brought from Mondstadt, some she recalled Ningguang liked, and some rounds of the Liyue Millennial where she lost with grace, put up a good fight. Ningguang was thoroughly impressed that Beidou learned the complex mechanics of her own game in such a short amount of time. It’s only a matter of time until she wins.
Then it peaks when Beidou has her face between Ningguang’s legs, crude and wolfish and hanging on to every word that pushed them forward, on every glance that held them at an impasse. Ningguang comes in her mouth, and Beidou commits to her memory Ningguang's taste, her fists in her hair, the way she cried out Beidou’s name.
Beidou comes, too, with Ningguang’s deft fingers between her legs and her smart mouth on her tits. No one has touched her the way Ningguang has, not with the same heat and intensity that Beidou feels herself burn inside out.
Then it ends with Beidou collecting her clothing from the floor and putting them on lazily. It’s late. There’s no one to see if a few buttons of her qipao are undone. They hadn’t spoken about it, but Beidou knows when she has to leave. She’s always been good at that.
Ningguang reclines into her pillows with the sheets draping over her figure, smoking her pipe; a sight for sore eyes, and Beidou knows she’s done for.
“Would it kill you to follow docking and goods protocols the next time you’re here?”
Beidou snorts, zipping up her boots and looking back at Ningguang. “As much as I enjoyed our time today, dearest Tianquan, I don’t think fucking the delinquency out of me is going to do the trick. You’ll have to find other ways.”
Ningguang rolls her eyes at the jab. They’ve known each other long enough to know when Beidou means it to tease, and when she means it to hurt. “When will you return, then? I’d appreciate being able to prepare for greying hairs every time I deal with you.”
“About three weeks - sufficient time, I’d say,” she turns to kiss Ningguang hotly, something for both of them to remember navigating the rough seas of Inazuma and the complex landscape of Teyvat politico. “For you to prepare, and for you to miss me.”
Ningguang nips at her lips and pushes her gently to send her out before her secretaries wake. “You think too highly of yourself if you think I’d miss the thorn in my side.”
-
Beidou doesn’t expect it to be a regular occurrence, but it becomes one, and every time she’s summoned to the chamber she finds herself in Ningguang’s bed after either a good scolding, or a quiet congratulations on a successful mission, or a small thank you for a favor delivered.
Not that Beidou is complaining. She loves to have Ningguang under her, or above her, fitting into every crevice of her body - smelling like the finest oils of the land and tasting like tea and tobacco, sometimes opium depending on the kind of day, weeks, months Ningguang is subjected to as the Tianquan.
Beidou starts missing her. Beidou brings her gifts, writes her letters. Those, too, become regular occurrences. How could she not? Ningguang kisses her sweetly, Ningguang lets her walls down, Ningguang writes back to her letters, sends ones as sweet as Ningguang can write on voyages that have Beidou at sea much longer.
The turquoise vase looks lovely in Ningguang’s hands as she marvels at it, the sheets pooling at her hips. Beidou looks up at her from the pillow, feeling languid but not sleepy; she wants to look at Ningguang a little more before she leaves in the morning.
(At one point they’d given up hiding it, and Beidou stayed the night when Ningguang had held her hand and asked her to stay for a while, Captain .)
“It’s lovely,” Ningguang murmurs, turning it around and seeing the written words Beidou had scrawled with her quill. She raises her eyebrow at ‘From The Crux’, knowing full well it’s only from Beidou, and thankfully says nothing. Beidou isn’t sure she can handle Ningguang voicing it out loud. “Thank you. It will find a home in my office.”
“Not such a bad expedition, eh?” Beidou tucks her arms under her head, and Ningguang watches the way her muscles flex at the movement. “I only broke precisely three laws.”
“A record, if I’ve ever seen one,” Ningguang says dryly, setting the vase down in exchange for burrowing under the duvet of her bed. She’d never taken to the cold as well as Beidou.
(“This isn’t even cold, Ning,” Beidou laughs, circling her arms around a slightly shivering Ningguang, who accepts the warmth of Beidou’s embrace in the middle of the cold seasons - as cold as it can get in Liyue, which is frankly not much compared to Mondstadt or Dragonspine.
“Just s-shut up and hold me, you reptile.”)
Beidou chuckles, making space for Ningguang to melt into her body. “It may not seem like it but I do enjoy meeting milestones.”
“Then this could only mean that my plan to fuck the delinquency out of you is effective,” Ningguang smiles into her jaw, and Beidou groans, knowing she walked right into that. Ningguang was always five steps ahead of everything, teasing and pillow talk included. “Uncrowned lord of the oceans, uncrowned king of dragons, now my docile little puppy, hmm?”
There’s a look in Ningguang’s eyes, hot and wanting and she knows what she’s doing, riling Beidou up like this.
Beidou flips them, has Ningguang on her back in a second. The woman has the audacity to smile up at her - daunting and daring Beidou to do something.
“Why don’t you see for yourself if you’ve fucked all of it out of me?”
(“I see there’s still much work for me to do,” Ningguang says, exhaling. Her neck and chest take a dark red blush as she moves down Beidou’s body from her position right above Beidou’s face.
“Just give it up, Ningguang,” Beidou tells her, kissing Ningguang raw and hot, the taste of her still on her tongue. “I’ll always be a pain in your ass and you love it.”)
-
The unforeseen cost of Beidou’s Vision is half of her eyesight, and as soon as she wakes from her deep and medicated slumber, she is reminded of what it took to win some and lose some on the same night.
(A zap of lightning graces her with a chain and an Electro Vision, and she holds it up in the air as the storm rages on, half of her face a bleeding, bloody mess - both hers and Haishan’s.)
“Good,” a voice at the corner of the room says, and she sees Ningguang approaching the bed with a cup of water infused with herbs, most likely from Baizhu if her spotty memory, as she drifted to and from slumber, serves her right. “The idiot who slew Haishan is awake. Drink this.”
Her words betray the smile on Ningguang’s face, worried and proud, as she helps Beidou drink the tepid liquid since her left arm is in a cast. She looks like a dream, and Beidou is half convinced it is one, when Ningguang drops a kiss on her forehead.
“You know, most people would call me a hero,” she says lightly, leaning back, enjoying the attention as Ningguang smooths her hand down her hair.
“Perhaps I’m not part of that ‘most people’ demographic.”
“You have terrible bedside manners.”
Ningguang only laughs, holding Beidou’s free hand in hers. “I’m not a healer, in case you’ve forgotten,” she caresses Beidou’s face with such care and tenderness Beidou has never felt from anyone else. “I don’t need to have bedside manners.”
Ningguang’s kisses, that day, taste like everything she doesn’t say - this is the tradeoff of loving heroes, but it is one I will gladly accept.
-
Beidou twirls Ningguang’s hair - a brilliantly spun light gold, like the noon sun on a clear day - as Ningguang lays on her chest with her hands folded under her chin, looking at Beidou with stars she was named after in her eyes.
There was no reason to hide the way they felt from each other, much more so when everyone around them knew, anyway.
They chat idly, talking about everything and nothing, and when the conversation lulls, Beidou asks: “you could have had anyone you wanted, and you chose me. Why?”
Ningguang raises a brow, but indulges Beidou anyway. “Hmm, handsome, strong, intelligent,” she says quietly. “No one takes up the space you do, in my life. No one gives me the same headache.”
Beidou laughs, kissing one of the hands Ningguang has, tracing the scar that traverses Beidou’s chest. “So if you meet someone stronger, smarter, more handsome, you’ll leave me?”
“Perhaps,” Ningguang hums - but the sweet kiss she gives Beidou tells her it’s a lie, and that there is no other. “What about me, then?”
“Brilliant, headstrong, the most beautiful woman I had ever laid my eyes on,” Beidou hums, and Ningguang lets out a small giggle at the compliment. “Gives me such a hard time.”
“So if you find another woman who would give you a hard time, would you leave me?”
She twirls Ningguang’s hair, massages her scalp, and Ningguang loves the attention. “I have never met anyone more difficult or beautiful or brilliant than you,” Beidou tells her fondly, kissing Ningguang again, just because she can. “So I think that means you’re safe, sweetheart.”
-
There are bad times, of course.
After heated arguments in Ningguang’s office or Beidou’s ship, they always find each other in bed after.
There are no words - not anymore, not when they exchanged so many painful and angry ones earlier - and instead the apologies are kissed into scarred and smooth skin.
-
There were countless rumors about the Tianquan - one of which Beidou never indulged in, but the rumor she found most absurd is that Ningguang did not have a heart.
It was for the better, she assumes, to keep the general public wondering about what kind of person Ningguang was, and to let them talk. The fewer people knew the better - about what made Ningguang laugh, what Ningguang looked like as she spoke to children, what Ningguang does in the shadows to help the common people of Liyue.
The rumor is dispelled like writing on sandy shores when Ningguang sacrifices her beloved Jade Chamber - her home, her life’s work, her pride and joy.
Behind the closed doors of one of Ningguang’s spare homes - sparsely decorated, designed precisely for situations like this - they lie in bed away from the rest of the world, and Beidou lets Ningguang’s very real heart shatter into a million pieces in the safety of her arms.
The Tianquan is a hero, people said after, and Beidou had known that before any of this ever happened.
(“How can you be a hero when it hurts like this all the time,” Ningguang sobs into her chest, hands gripping Beidou’s waist.
“You may not know it, but you’ve been Liyue’s hero the moment they named you Tianquan,” Beidou tells her, her hands rubbing at Ningguang’s shoulders. “This just hurts more than everything else, and you can be upset about it. You lost your home.”
“I want it to stop hurting,” Ningguang cries, her hot tears seeping through the bandages on Beidou’s chest. “ Please. ”
Beidou sighs, and holds Ningguang tighter.)
They don’t sleep, and the glaze lilies, inside the turquoise vase Ningguang had carried with her before she let the Jade Chamber fall, weep with its owner.
-
Several summers pass, and Beidou starts to grow some grey hairs.
(In her defense, her mother’s hair was worse compared to the slivers of silver at Beidou’s tender age of thirty-five.)
“You’re getting grey hairs already?” Ningguang chuckles, smoothing down Beidou’s wild hair sticking to her forehead. It was summer, hot and humid; Beidou will be on land a little longer than usual to be with Liyue’s beloved Tianquan. “Here I thought I would be first with all the unnecessary stress you’ve given me over the years.”
“Guess your little plan all those years ago worked,” Beidou tells her, laughing when Ningguang does as well. She kisses Ningguang’s palm for good measure. “Though I think you need to keep checking, once in a while, to make sure it did.”
Ningguang raises a brow, but the smile on her face…
There would be no one else, just Ningguang for the rest of her life.
“Oh my, captain, are you asking to marry me?”
“Yes,” Beidou says. She reaches over to her pouch and brandishes a simple golden band with Ningguang’s and Beidou’s constellations finely engraved inside it. “Just to make sure you were successful.”
“So romantic, I’m swooning,” Ningguang replies dryly, but she’s smiling as she takes the ring and gives Beidou her sweetest yes .