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Lumine glared at the amber liquid in her glass, mentally retracing the evening’s mistakes. The first red flag: Childe’s smile had been too wide when he’d waved from across the tavern, that familiar glint that always preceded trouble. The second: his casual “just catching up” as he’d guided her to a corner booth with promises of “the best skewers in Nod-Krai.” The third, and most damning, his offhand comment that tonight would be “perfectly safe,” accompanied by that theatrical wink.
Then she rounded the corner and locked eyes with that mask. That damned mask.
“You didn’t mention company,” she’d hissed at Childe, who merely shrugged.
Now she spun the wheel on the roulette special, landing on something violently purple with floating berries, and downed it in one motion. Firewater scorched down her throat, her eyes watering as she slammed the glass down. Not a cough. Not even a wince. She was the Honorary Knight, Hero of Liyue, Captain of the Swordfish II, First Sage of Buer, Tumaini… She wasn’t about to lose a drinking game to a pair of Harbingers.
Rising too quickly, the room tilted. Her knee banged the table. Childe’s hand appeared at her elbow, steadying her with practiced ease. Of course he caught it immediately.
“Some Berries and Fried Meat for my Comrade,” he called to a passing server, “and water?”
She sank back onto the bench, noting how the server didn’t even question serving her another round despite her being roughly the height of three stacked melons and having already consumed enough alcohol to fell a hilichurl battalion. Anywhere else, they’d have never served her more than juice, but this was Nod-Krai, where bartenders asked no questions, answered to no law, and probably wouldn’t bat an eye if a pile of slimes wearing a cloak ordered the house special.
The plate hit the table with a sound like a gavel. The Traveler descended on the berries and fried meat with the focused intensity of someone who had recently discovered opposable thumbs and wasn’t about to waste the evolutionary advantage. Her hands moved with suspicious independence, one nabbing the fork while the other created a strategic barrier between the plate and potential thieves. Lakaberry juice set like bruises across her knuckles. She did not meet Childe’s eyes; she was busy chewing vindication into a pulp while mentally calculating how many more plates it would take to absorb the alcohol currently staging a coup in her bloodstream.
To his credit, Childe didn’t flinch at her speed, only sipped serenely at his own drink, the picture of an older brother pleased with his sibling’s performance. Some of the juice splattered across the table. He chose not to notice. He did reach for a portion, fingers poised in a peaceable, diplomatic manner, as if the plate were a newly seized border, not the frontlines of an ongoing war.
Lumine bared her teeth and, without ceasing to eat, let out a warning noise that was neither polite nor fully human. Childe glanced toward the sound, then back to Dottore, whose mask was angled so perfectly straight it might as well have been nailed in place.
Dottore tilted his head at a precise forty-five degree angle. “You know,” he said, “some berries rehydrate better than water. I see you intend to test this hypothesis personally. Though your methodology lacks certain... controls.”
Lumine shoved more food into her mouth with such mechanical efficiency that one might wonder if her jaw had been replaced with industrial hinges. She punctuated this with a backward glare that somehow managed to make eye contact with both men simultaneously. Her left hand, operating with apparent autonomy from her brain, was already stacking the remaining berries into what appeared to be a small, structurally unsound fortress.
Dottore rotated his glass with one finger, not drinking so much as measuring the viscosity of its contents against the curvature of the glass. If he was disappointed or amused by the Traveler’s lack of composure, it was impossible to tell. His focus drifted, at intervals, between the gradual reduction of food on the plate and the way Lumine never let go of her fork, even while gesticulating.
Childe made conversation as one might guide a wounded animal out of a trap, casual and slow. He asked after her sibling, after the state of Mondstadt’s winter, after any recent business with the Adventurers’ Guild. Dottore sipped, or pretended to, at regular intervals, his mask gathering and dispersing reflections from the dull lighting overhead. He contributed nothing, not even a data point.
As Lumine sucked the last of the meat juices off her fingers, the second platter arrived, this one larger, stacked with unfamiliar skewers interspersed with shavings of candied root and thinly-sliced root vegetables, Lumine realised it was time to pardon herself to the restroom before something worse than an inebriated stumble happened.
The world swayed around her as she placed the fork down, delicately, almost reverently, as if the act marked a truce between herself and the plate, and pushed back from the table. For a moment she watched herself from the outside: an upright, golden-haired marionette whose strings had been cut, legs dangling at odd angles under the booth.
“I’ll be right back,” she announced, not quite slurred, but with just enough deliberate enunciation to warn the room that some internal equilibrium had been forcibly reestablished. Her gaze swept across Dottore, who tilted his mask in acknowledgement, and Childe, whose smile now struggled to remain within the boundaries of his face. Childe’s teeth glinted. Dottore’s teeth, presumably, also glinted, but remained hypothetical for the time being.
The walk to the restroom was less a walk and more a controlled fall, punctuated by the odd table edge and the suspicious glances of patrons pretending not to recognise her. In the low-lit antechamber she braced both palms against the cool stone of the sink and stared down at the swirling faucet, which glugged out water with the obstinacy of a wounded animal. The face that glared back at her in the mirror belonged to someone she’d only met recently: hair in disarray, skin flushed and freckled with berry residue, an expression that suggested she was currently housing at least three conflicting opinions about gravity.
She splashed water on her face until her thoughts reassembled into a single line of reasoning: do not die tonight. Not in the Flagship’s bathroom, and most importantly, not in front of that mask. Death would require paperwork she was in no condition to complete.
On the way back to the table, she detoured into a corridor that promised privacy, though only delivered on the promise in the sense that she hadn’t seen another soul since stepping into it. She slowed, steadier now, and at last studied, with unbroken attention, the back of the Second Harbinger as he sat in the booth. The mask and its attached mantle caught the ambient light and fractured it, casting glossy black feathers in a halo that bristled over the collarbone like murder in freeze-frame. She could see, even from here, the subtle displacement of individual quills as he moved, each shimmering with an oil-slick sheen that dared the world to touch them.
Lumine decided she would.
She approached with the calculated air of a cat stalking its adversary, not the prey, but another, larger cat. Childe, deep in conference with his glass, did not look up until the last moment. The corner of his mouth twitched, as if he sensed the formation of an event horizon and wanted to see what would fall in first.
She stopped behind Dottore and, after a second’s consideration involving at least two competing internal opinions, leaned forward and draped herself over his shoulders as she might over the railing of a ship. Her chin hit the flamboyant copper bird-head that capped his right pauldrons. The bird, for its part, seemed equally surprised by the development. For a moment she considered whether it was real metal or if she could snap it off his shoulder with the right application of chin strength? A skill she was reasonably certain she had. She would have tried, too, except her left hand had already gone rogue and was, with deliberate pressure, drawing a pinched handful of the feathered mantle into her fist.
Without moving his head, Dottore radiated a tension that could be mapped along the set of his shoulders. He did not stiffen, nor did he otherwise acknowledge her presence, though his mask slid a half-degree in her direction, enough for the glass to reflect her face back at her, upside down and stretched, like a funhouse mirror operated by someone with a grudge.
Childe, across the table, set his glass down so gently it didn’t even clink the wood. He was, at this point, running mental calculations of the room’s structural integrity, the likely lethality of the various cutlery, and the historical precedents for “drunken feather-plucking” in prewar diplomacy. Statistically, this ended in murder. But the Traveler’s hand, instead of going for the mask or the carotid, tugged a single feather loose from its mooring, the barbs whispering as they separated.
The silence that followed was so complete it achieved a kind of negative sound, an anti-echo that crawled in the cracks of every conversation in the tavern. Lumine held up her prize and considered it critically, then tucked it behind her ear with the air of someone finally evening the score.
Dottore’s voice, when it arrived, was so close it bypassed the usual channels and planted itself directly behind her eyes. “Do you collect trophies, Traveler? Or just indulge primitive urges under duress?”
She leaned her chin further into the copper bird’s side, earning a faint, satisfying squeak from the decoration. The sound reminded her of a toy she’d once confiscated from a hilichurl. “Just trying to see if they’re real,” she said, adjusting her weight as if conducting a routine inspection. “You wouldn’t believe how many people ask. Some think you’re actually three small men stacked inside a very long coat.”
“Unscientific,” Dottore said, but there was a pause between each syllable, as if he were logging the methodology for later review. “And anatomically improbable.”
Childe, newly emboldened, said, “They’re all real. But if you wanted feathers, you could just ask.” He glanced at the two, searching for signs of imminent arterial spray and, finding none, grinned in relief while calculating how many napkins it would take to mop up a Harbinger-sized bloodstain.
Lumine, her balance compromised from the impact, rolled to the side along the booth’s high back, coming to rest with her cheek pressed to the top of Dottore’s mantle. She discovered it to be both softer and more alarming than she’d expected, like laying your face on a cat that, in its heart, is genuinely considering murder. With her new leverage, she whispered at the back of Dottore’s mask, “You ever let anyone see your face?”
A brief stutter. The feathers shivered, infinitesimal. “Unnecessary,” he replied. “Besides, it’s customary to keep one’s protection in place when in the company of assassins. Current company doubly so.”
There was a certain generosity in the fact that Dottore didn’t immediately launch her through a window. Instead, he pivoted, slow and deliberate, turning side-on to the table, taking her weight fully on his right shoulder, anchoring her in place as if she were a particularly obtrusive bird.
She did not object. Instead, after a moment, she drew her arm around from behind him, threading her fingers through her scarf to unfasten her earring with the methodical precision of someone defusing a bomb they’d personally designed. The piece was handmade, two feathers wrapped in wire: one white, one pale blue, the kind of accessory that suggested “I either killed these birds myself or know someone who did.” With a deft twist, she snapped the black feather’s calamus between her fingernails and tamped it alongside the others, rebuilding the accessory as if following an instruction manual for escalating diplomatic incidents. She looped it through her lobe with one smooth, callous motion and let it hang there. Tricolour, almost ostentatiously so.
Childe saw it first. Of course he did. His smile vanished, replaced by the tight, full-lipped grimace of a soldier watching a friend step into an enemy’s colours. He masked it with a cough and a hasty refill of his glass. The situation, which only moments ago had seemed to teeter on the edge of comedic violence, now felt like a declaration. If Dottore’s mask had been a flag, the earring was now a miniature, blazoned standard, hoisted and secured like the world’s smallest, most impractical coup.
Dottore’s internal processes, sharp and numerous as cutting blades, spun through the event in parallel threads, the mental equivalent of three scientists frantically taking notes on the same catastrophe. He watched as she adjusted the earring, saw how her hands trembled only from exertion, not fear, and recognised, perhaps before she did, what it would look like. This alignment of colours, this manufactured kinship. It said: I see you, and I am not afraid. It said: Your threats are worth less to me than your plumes. Most damning, it said: I can claim what’s yours and make it mine, and I’ll do the paperwork later.
The next several heartbeats composed a fugue of inaction. Lumine reclined, chin cocked at a challenging angle, her newly crested left ear catching the low amber light like a traffic signal warning of danger ahead. Childe measured out the perimeter of silence with the careful precision of someone mapping a minefield while wearing roller skates.
Dottore himself simply reached toward the earring, not with violence, nor speed, but with the same clinical interest one might show when discovering an unauthorised amendment to one’s budget allocation. Two fingers hovered millimeters from the feathers. He tilted his head at an angle that suggested the top third of his body might be operating independently from the lower portions. The addition of the black feather did not cheapen the earring. It completed it.
“You’re missing a colour,” he said finally, voice so low it barely crossed the centerline of the table. His mask tilted, reflecting a monochrome inversion of Lumine’s face. “Don’t you need four to make a set?”
“No,” Lumine replied with the calm certainty of someone explaining that water is, in fact, wet. “I like this arrangement better.”
There was a glitch in Dottore’s poise; it barely registered, but Childe caught it. So did Lumine. The earring swung in the space between them, pendulum-like, marking the seconds until someone inevitably did something regrettable.