Chapter Text
Lumine’s phone rang. It buzzed against the wood of her nightstand, shattering the stillness of 3:04 AM.
The screen lit up: Blocked number: C—do not interact.
Moonlight cut across her room in slanted lines, casting long shadows over the silken sheets twisted around her waist. Her heartbeat stuttered—not from fear, but from muscle memory. From recognition. That name had been buried in the layers of her dark past, and now it was coming back to light.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
A second later, his voice filled the room through voicemail: raw, cracked.
“Ying, baby… I’d like to talk to you.”
A beat. A breath.
“This time, no lies. I swear. Just… call me back. Please. I can’t sleep. I keep seeing your face everywhere I go.”
She sat still, the sound of his voice crawling under her skin.
“I need to make things right with you.”
She stared at the screen until it dimmed out, taking his name with it. Just a glow, and then nothing.
The air smelled like lavender and incense smoke. Her chest felt hollow, with the kind of hurt that's cradled in silence, the kind with a numbness more potent than any sedative.
She’d been here before.
Late-night voicemails pleading for forgiveness. Whispered apologies spun from champagne breath and cocaine-dusted fingers. Promises wrapped in velvet but lined with rot. Childe was always more illusion than man—a song you couldn’t stop humming, even after it broke your ribs and punctured your lungs.
She could’ve picked up. Archon knows part of her still wanted to. Wanted the lie one last time, just to feel something warm for a second.
But instead, she reached for her notebook—worn brown leather, bent at the corners—and opened to a blank page. This time, she wouldn't write about him.
She put her pen to the paper, and wrote about the silence after a violent storm. About the power in not replying. About choosing yourself when the world keeps asking you to put it first. She wrote and wrote and wrote until the dark sky began to bleed pink and orange, signaling the coming of a new dawn.
Lumine set the pen back down, in between pages full of her handwriting. Her phone still lay face-down, his voice trapped inside it, unable to touch her. With a tired brain and ink-stained hands, she drifted back to sleep under silk and moonlight.