Chapter Text
"I'm back," Hu Tao says into the silence of her house.
Yanfei's moved from the kitchen to the living room in the time that Hu Tao had been gone. The half-adeptus folds and unfolds the paper note in her hands.
"I'm going through with it." Hu Tao continues. "I'm sorry that I'm upsetting you, but I can't be sorry for doing this."
Yanfei draws in a breath through her nose. The paper note tears between her fingers. "Do you even know what you're getting involved in?" She asks.
"I trust Aether to know what he's doing with the abyss."
"And Alice? With Zhongli?" Yanfei hisses.
Hu Tao takes a few cautious steps into the room. Yanfei picks at the note, shredding the paper and flicking bits of white down onto the floor.
"I know that the Hexenzirkel aren't the best about being good." Hu Tao emphasizes. "I was there for the first cataclysm, in case you forgot."
"Then you should know not to gamble on them." Yanfei says. She lets the last shreds of paper fall from her hands, the pieces floating down to the living room floor like snow. "Tthey're reckless. Can barely look at the well being of people beyond their immediate circle. Especially Alice." She finally looks up at Hu Tao. "It's not even just something long ago." She continues. Yanfei stands up, and in a few short strides, stops just in front of Hu Tao.
"Did you know? Just barely a decade ago, one of Alice's projects went sideways and nearly wiped out an entire village in Sumeru." Yanfei says quietly. "I was there for a client at the time. Aether managed to clean it up and they set everything back to rights within the hours, but that doesn't mean that people didn't get hurt." She laughs, the sound coming out a bit crazed. "You don't get turned into a bird spontaneously and then back, and come out the other end okay.
"You don't know what Alice has in plan for Zhongli. Or how she'll deal with the abyssal energy in that seal," Yanfei continues, still laughing. "Fuck, Childe is probably still stuck in there. Who knows what'll come crawling out if you break the seal?" Yanfei's heaving for breath by the end of her tirade. Erratic chuckles bubble out of her chest. She slumps forward, burying her face in one hand, and running the other through her hair.
Hu Tao falls silent. Slowly, she reaches up with the free hand, resting her palm down on Yanfei's shoulder.
"I trust Aether," She whispers. "He'll be there the entire time, so we won't have to worry about Childe or the Abyss. And for Zhongli…" She trails off, squeezing Yanfei's shoulder. "Trust me?" She croaks out, "Things like death and reincarnation, that's my specialty. I'll make sure that Zhongli can head on off ahead myself."
Yanfei draws in a few more shaking breaths. She isn't outright crying, not yet, at any rate, and Hu Tao certainly hopes that she won't start crying now.
"Are you sure?" Yanfei asks quietly. She finally lowers her own arms, glancing up at Hu Tao. "Are you certain?"
"I'm sure." Hu Tao raises her arms, slowly pulling Yanfei into a hug. Yanfei leans forward, burying her face in Hu Tao's shoulder. The fragment of the Gate, still clutched in Hu Tao's closed fist, thrashes around. Hu Tao clenches her hand tigheter, careful not to let the entity touch Yanfei.
"I know what I'm doing," She soothes, "And I'm sure of what I'm doing. Trust me?"
Yanfei snorts wetly into Hu Tao's shoulder. Her hands come up to clasp around Hu Tao's back. She squeezes tight, once, then slowly pulls back and extricates herself from Hu Tao's grip. "Fine," She sniffles, "Just because it's you."
As soon as Hu Tao arrives at the site, Aether rushes forward and practically yanks her bag out of her hands.
He gives her a sheepish smile. "Hi, thanks for the stuff. We're kind of in a rush." And with that flood of words, runs off back towards where Alice and Lumine are tinkering at some complicated looking mechanism.
Hu Tao squints at the set-up at her feet. The majority of the sigils are foreign to her, but she can make out some Liyuen-style anchoring structures woven into the massive array displayed over the grass. Aether rushes from on end of the array over to the other, placing the Cor Lapis on one side, and the Glaze Lily on the other.
She finds a small patch of shade, under a nearby rock, to plop down in as she watches Aether and Lumine rush around, to and fro.
The sliver of the Gate is still in her hand. The shard a refreshing icy cold compared to the heat of the summer sun bearing down from overhead.
Hu Tao thinks she might've drifted off, at some point. She has her free hand buried in the grass, and all she can feel are the living things rushing around her. The grass as it stretches towards the sun. The bugs crawling beneath the dirt. Alice and Aether and Lumine planning and building and running around.
Far, far, beneath all of that, buried under layers of Earth, lies a storm.
Is Zhongli even conscious, down in that seal? Hu Tao sure hopes not. Childe certainly wasn't. Was there comfort to be found in that? To lie in blissful oblivion, undisturbed for millennia, with the knowledge that only a precious person was trapped by your side, and that the rest of your precious people were safe because of it.
She hopes that there isn't enough of Zhongli left in the seal to be aware of that. It feels like it would be agony.
She hopes that there's still enough of Zhongli left that a fragment of him could perhaps be born human. It'd be a fitting end, for the god who desired nothing but a quiet end.
"Hu Tao!"
Hu Tao looks up. Alice waves at her from the other side of the array. The golden-haired witch is standing in front of the largest of her machines. She waves a hand in the air, beckoning Hu Tao over.
"Last piece?" Hu Tao calls out. She climbs to her feet and bounds towards the machine. Alice nods as she draws close. She reaches towards the mechanism and flips a hatch open.
"'All things must die'," She quotes, waving a hand towards the gap.
Hu Tao holds her clenched fist over the slot. She uncurls her fingers, finally releasing the sliver of the Gate. For a brief moment, the fragment seems to cling to her skin, as if unwilling to let go. As the substance slowly peels away from her, however, it latches down onto the edges of the slot, fusing with the metal and clinging to the frame.
She slowly withdraws her hand, letting out a breah in a rush of air. Alice nonchalantly flips the hatc closed, and curves around the side of the machine.
"You might want to step back for this next part," She singsongs, then ducks down to fiddle with a set of controls.
Aether comes up to Hu Tao. He bumps his shoulder against hers, then gently takes her forearm in his hand. She lets him drag her away from the ritual site. The stop a short ways away, taking shelter by the same patch of rocks Hu Tao had been slumped at earlier. Lumine offers her a small smile and a wave.
"Does Alice need us for anything else?" Hu Tao squints over to where the witch is tinkering with her inventions.
"Just for me and Lumine to grab onto and purify all the Abyssla energy we can get." Aether says. He raises a hand; he's got something that looks like a set of golden bangles that have been tied together strapped around his wrist. He shakes his hand; the contraption jingles. "Lumine and I are basically walking Abyssal energy magnets right now, so that's handled." He pauses, gaze flitting back towards the ritual site. "And as for Zhongli…"
"I've got that." Hu Tao snaps in. The words come out a bit sharper than she'd intended, and she winces. "Sorry, but I wouldn't trust anyone else with it anyway."
Aether just laughs good-naturedly. "No, that's alright." He smiles. "I get it. Zhongli's your family."
"Starting now!" Alice calls out. Hu Tao barely has the time to twist her line of sight back to the ritual before Alice activates her machinery.
Everything snaps together in a rush. There's a burst of golden light erupting from the ground in a geyser. Pure, raw, geo energy. It's the most elemental energy that Hu Tao has felt ever since she woke up in this foreign future. It surges up in a storm, glittering and crackling as the earth beneath it is torn asunder.
Aether yells something at his sister, and the twins dash off towards the epicenter. Hu Tao can barely catch sight of the flecks of black and purple abyssal energy seeping out from the hole in the ground before Aether and Lumine quash it.
The sigils at their feet light up in shades of yellow and gold. Hu Tao can hear them crackling as they snap apart.
She reaches her hand forward, something in her chest feeling like it's set to burst. There's particles of geo energy slowly floating down from the sky. They bunch together, slowly condensing into a formless blob.
She used to jokingly call Zhongli's dragon form a scaly noodle, and he'd always have the most disgruntled expression afterwards. It's the exuvia, he'd say, a divine vessel and an elegant one worthy of it's title.
It's a massive scaly-noodle, Hu Tao would laugh back. Bizarrely, that memory is all that she can focus on how, as she lifts her hands up to catch a small geo-energy construct in her hands. The blob shifts and twists, and eventually, there's a small dragon in Hu Tao's hands.
It's a small thing, perhaps the size of a field mouse, and a spitting image of the exuvia. It feels warm in Hu Tao's hands, despite having no mass. The little dragon curls up in her hands. It nudges at her thumb with it's nose; Hu Tao can't feel the touch at all.
She cups it in her palms, folding her hands closed around it. She squeezes her eyes shut, feeling the thrumming pulse of geo energy against her skin.
She presses her lips against her knuckles.
It was lovely seeing you again, she thinks. And when she opens her eyes and unclasps her hands, the small dragon is gone, speckles of light dissipating into the wind.