Chapter Text
He was discharged from the Cathedral two weeks after he’d been carried in. Barbara pronounced him healed with the same brisk efficiency she’d applied to everything else, handed him a list of restrictions he immediately intended to ignore, and told him to come back if anything felt wrong.
“Define ‘wrong,’” Lohen said.
“Pain that isn’t normal,” Barbara said.
“All pain is normal.”
Barbara gave him the look she had clearly developed specifically for him over the course of his recovery — patient, slightly exasperated, fundamentally unintimidated. “Come back if anything feels wrong, Vice Captain.”
He returned to the barracks. He returned to his duties. He returned to the steady rhythm of patrol and paperwork and training drills, and he was careful, in the way that Varka had demanded and that Lohen had grudgingly agreed to, not to take on anything that would undo Barbara’s work before it had fully set.
He was careful. He was measured. He was, by every external metric, behaving himself.
Internally, he was a disaster.
It happened gradually, which was the worst possible way for it to happen. Lohen could have handled a sudden revelation — he was good with sudden things, with sharp decisive moments that required immediate action. What he was not good with was the slow accumulation of small things that added up, over weeks and months, to something he couldn’t dismiss.
The way Varka checked in on him after his discharge — not hovering, not patronizing, but present. A word in passing in the corridor. A glance across the training yard that said I know you’re here, I’m keeping an eye on you without any of the possessiveness that usually accompanied an alpha’s attention. The way he had, quietly and without announcement, adjusted the Fifth Company’s patrol rotations so that Lohen’s most demanding assignments never fell in the week before his cycle.
Lohen had noticed. He had noticed and said nothing, because acknowledging it would have required acknowledging that Varka was paying that particular kind of attention, and acknowledging that would have required him to examine why it mattered.
He was not ready to examine why it mattered.
There was also the matter of the drinking.
Varka had, at some point during Lohen’s recovery, extended an open invitation to share a drink whenever Lohen felt like it. It was the kind of casual, expansive generosity that was simply part of Varka’s character — the man collected people the way other people collected debts, pulling them into his orbit with the easy warmth of someone who genuinely liked humanity and saw no reason to be stingy about it.
Lohen had accepted the first time out of something between curiosity and contrariness. He didn’t even like alcohol. He hated the taste of it. He had accepted the second time because the first time had been — against all expectation — genuinely enjoyable. By the fifth time, he had stopped pretending he needed a reason.
They talked about everything and nothing. Battles, strategy, the particular absurdity of certain Knights of Favonius regulations, the expedition, the state of Mondstadt’s northern borders. Varka told stories with the extravagant enthusiasm of a man who had lived too much to be modest about it, and Lohen listened and occasionally interjected with the kind of dry, precise commentary that made Varka laugh — a real laugh, full-bodied and unguarded, the laugh of a man who found something genuinely funny rather than performing amusement.
Lohen found, to his profound irritation, that he liked making Varka laugh.
He liked the way Varka listened, too. Most people listened to Lohen the way they watched a dangerous animal — with their attention split between what was being said and the question of whether they were about to be bitten. Varka listened with his whole attention, his eyes steady and interested, and when he disagreed he said so directly and without apology, and when he agreed he said that too, and the whole exchange had the quality of two people who respected each other enough to be honest.
Lohen had not had many conversations like that in his life.
He told himself it was simply the pleasure of being taken seriously. He told himself that what he felt in Varka’s company was nothing more than the particular satisfaction of being seen clearly and not found wanting. He told himself this with great conviction for approximately four months.
Then Varka did something unforgivable.
It was a nothing moment. The kind of moment that had no business being significant.
They were in Varka’s office, late in the evening, the remains of a bottle of Dandelion Wine between them. Lohen had been describing, with considerable relish, the particular look on a Fatui agent’s face when he’d realized that the “abandoned supply cache” he’d been sent to retrieve had been replaced, item by item, with rocks. Varka was laughing. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, and the room was warm and amber-lit, and outside the wind was doing something dramatic over the city.
And Varka looked at him — just looked at him, in the middle of the story, with an expression that Lohen had no category for. Not admiration, not amusement, not the careful regard of a superior assessing a subordinate. Something quieter than all of those. Something that had no tactical application whatsoever.
Something that looked, with horrible clarity, like fondness.
Lohen stopped talking.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” Varka said, and smiled, and refilled Lohen’s cup.
Lohen stared at him for a moment, then looked away, and finished his drink, and made an excuse to leave shortly afterward.
He walked back to the barracks in the cold night air and stood outside his door for a long time, his breath misting in the dark, his mind very quiet in the particular way it went quiet when he was processing something he didn’t want to process.
Then he went inside, sat on the edge of his bed, and spent a long time staring at his own hands.
Oh, he thought.
Oh, that’s a problem.
He was in love with Varka.
He arrived at this conclusion the way he arrived at most conclusions — through a process of rigorous elimination, ruling out every alternative explanation until only the most accurate one remained. He had tried admiration and found it insufficient. He had tried respect and found it too small. He had tried gratitude and camaraderie and the particular bond of shared experience and found all of them true but none of them complete.
What remained, after all the alternatives had been discarded, was the simple and catastrophic truth: he loved the man.
Not because of instinct. That was the first thing he checked, with the cold thoroughness of someone who had spent his entire adult life distrusting his own biology. He examined the feeling from every angle, looking for the particular quality of omega instinct — the pull toward an alpha’s strength, the biological imperative toward bonding and nesting and all the things he’d spent years fighting down. He found none of it.
What he felt for Varka had nothing to do with the fact that Varka was an alpha. It would have been exactly the same if Varka had been a beta, or an omega, or nothing at all.
It was the man himself. His absurd, inexhaustible warmth. The way he laughed. The way he listened. The way he had looked at Lohen — at the broken, furious, impossible thing that Lohen was — and said I need you alive with the conviction of someone who meant it not as a strategic assessment but as a simple, personal truth.
The way he had never once, in all the years Lohen had known him, used his power over Lohen’s life to diminish him.
The way his life had started from the same place as Lohen’s and gone somewhere extraordinary, and the way that fact, instead of making Lohen feel inadequate, made him feel — for the first time in his memory — understood.
It was sickening. It was the most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to him, and Lohen had once been kidnapped by a man with every intention of experimenting on him.
He loved Varka, and he was going to take this information to his grave.
He was very good at keeping secrets. He had been keeping secrets since he was old enough to understand that the world rewarded people who showed less of themselves than they possessed. He kept this one with the same discipline he applied to everything — compartmentalized, contained, locked behind the same walls he’d built at twelve years old and reinforced ever since.
He went to work. He led his company. He took on the missions that required his particular skillset and completed them with the efficiency and brutality that had earned him his reputation. He sat across from Varka in the Grand Master’s office and drank Dandelion Wine and talked about nothing important and kept his face perfectly, professionally neutral.
He was fine. He was completely fine.
He was also, he noted with grim resignation, sleeping worse than ever.
Months passed. The secret stayed secret. Lohen told no one — not because there was anyone he would have told, but because the act of keeping it felt like the only form of control he had left over the situation. He could not control the feeling. He could control who knew about it.
He controlled it ferociously.
The problem with secrets, Lohen had always known, was that they had a way of choosing their own moment of disclosure. You could guard them carefully for years, and then some small, stupid circumstance would strip every defense away in an instant.
He had not accounted for his own biology.
It was the pre-heat that did it. Not a full heat — he was still a week away from that, still in the grey zone between normal and not, where his senses were sharper than usual and his emotional regulation was somewhat less reliable than he liked. He had managed this phase dozens of times. He knew its rhythms, its particular textures, the way it made everything feel slightly too close and too bright.
What he had not managed, in all those previous cycles, was being caught in it by Varka.
It happened in the corridor outside the briefing room, late in the afternoon, when most of the building had emptied out. Lohen had been heading back to his quarters to begin the careful process of managing the next several days — suppressing what could be suppressed, scheduling his absence before it became necessary, maintaining the fiction that this was all perfectly under control.
He turned a corner and walked directly into Varka.
The Grand Master caught him by reflex, one large hand closing around Lohen’s arm to steady him, and the contact — skin through fabric, the warmth of it, the scent of pine and cold iron that Lohen had been carefully not thinking about for months — hit him like a physical blow.
His carefully maintained composure did something it had never done before.
It cracked.
Not all the way. Not immediately. But the crack was there, and Varka — who had spent years learning to read Lohen the way Lohen read everyone else — saw it in the fraction of a second before Lohen could reassemble his expression.
“Hey.” Varka’s voice was quiet, his hand still on Lohen’s arm. Not gripping, just present. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Lohen said. His voice was steady. His voice was always steady.
Varka looked at him. The corridor was empty. The afternoon light came through the high windows in long, slanted bars. Lohen could feel his own heartbeat in a way that was deeply inconvenient.
“You’re not fine,” Varka said, with the calm certainty of someone who had been paying attention for a very long time.
“I’m always fine.”
“Lohen.”
The way he said the name — not a command, not a reprimand, just his name, spoken with the particular weight of someone who knew exactly who they were talking to and wasn’t going anywhere — undid something in Lohen’s chest that he had spent months keeping carefully tied.
“I’m entering pre-heat,” Lohen said, because that much was obvious and there was no point in pretending otherwise. “I was going to my quarters. I’ll be off rotation by tomorrow morning. Everything is handled.”
“I know,” Varka said. He hadn’t moved. His hand was still on Lohen’s arm, and Lohen was acutely, miserably aware of it. “That’s not what I’m asking about.”
Lohen looked at him. The pre-heat had stripped away several of his usual layers — the ones that kept his expression professionally neutral, that kept his voice at the right temperature, that kept the distance between what he felt and what he showed exactly where he needed it to be.
He was aware, with the particular clarity of someone whose defenses were compromised, that he was looking at Varka the way he was not supposed to look at Varka.
“Don’t,” Lohen said, quietly.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
Varka’s expression shifted. Something in it softened, and sharpened, and settled into a kind of careful stillness that Lohen had never seen on him before. “Like what?”
Lohen’s jaw tightened. The pre-heat was a traitor. His own body was a traitor. Everything was conspiring against him, and he was standing in a corridor with Varka’s hand on his arm and the secret he had kept for months pressing against the inside of his teeth like something that had been held underwater too long and was finally fighting its way to the surface.
“Like you know,” Lohen said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended.
A long silence. Varka looked at him, and Lohen looked back, and the corridor was very quiet.
“Maybe I do,” Varka said, at last.
Lohen closed his eyes. “Varka.”
“I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed,” Varka said, his voice low and even. “And I’m not going to pretend I don’t—” He stopped. Started again. “I’m not going to lie to you, kid. I haven’t been lying to you, not once, in all the time I’ve known you. I’m not starting now.”
Lohen opened his eyes.
Varka’s expression was the same one he’d had in the office that evening — the one Lohen had filed away under fondness and tried not to think about. Up close, in the direct light of the corridor, it was unmistakable. It was also, Lohen noted with a kind of distant, helpless despair, mutual.
“The feelings,” Lohen said, carefully, “are mutual.”
“Yes,” Varka said.
“I hate this. I have been keeping this secret for—”
“I know.” There was something in Varka’s voice that might, in a lesser man, have been called tenderness. “I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out.”
Lohen stared at him. “You knew?”
“I suspected,” Varka said, with the faintest suggestion of a smile. “You’re very good at keeping a straight face, but you’ve been looking at me differently for months. And I know what you look like when you’re working something out.”
“I should have poisoned your wine again,” Lohen said, with feeling.
Varka laughed — the real laugh, full-bodied and unguarded — and the sound of it did exactly what it always did to Lohen’s chest, which was deeply unfair given the circumstances.
Then Varka’s expression settled back into seriousness, and he looked at Lohen with the steady, unhurried attention that Lohen had come to recognize as the way Varka approached things that mattered.
“I’m not going to do anything about this right now,” Varka said.
Lohen blinked. “What?”
“You’re entering pre-heat.” Varka’s voice was careful and deliberate. “Your judgment is compromised. Not badly, not yet, but enough that I’m not willing to have the conversation we need to have while you’re in this state.”
He met Lohen’s eyes. “I’m not going to take you on as a mate — I’m not going to take any step in that direction — until we’ve talked about what that would actually mean. What you want. What you’re willing to accept and what you aren’t. What I can offer and what I can’t.”
Lohen stared at him. Something in his chest was doing something complicated.
“You’re serious,” Lohen said.
“I’m always serious about things that matter.”
“You’re refusing me.”
“I’m deferring,” Varka said, with a patience that was somehow more infuriating than impatience would have been. “There’s a difference. I’m not saying no. I’m saying not yet. Not like this.” His grip on Lohen’s arm tightened, just slightly. “You have spent your entire life fighting against the idea of being claimed by an alpha. I am not going to let the first step toward this be something that happens because your heat made it easy. You deserve better than that. We both do.”
The words landed in Lohen’s chest and sat there, warm and immovable.
He looked at Varka for a long moment. The anger he’d expected to feel — the reflexive fury at being told to wait, at having a decision made for him — didn’t come. What came instead was something quieter. Something that felt, with horrible clarity, like being known.
“You’re insufferable,” Lohen said.
“Probably,” Varka agreed.
“When I’m recovered,” Lohen said, slowly, “we’re going to have that conversation.”
“Yes,” Varka said. “We are.”
“And I’m going to say things that are difficult to hear.”
“I expect nothing less.”
Lohen held his gaze for another moment. Then he stepped back, out of Varka’s grip, and straightened his uniform with the precise, deliberate movements of someone reassembling their composure.
“Go away, Grand Master,” Lohen said. “I need to go to my quarters.”
Varka stepped aside. But as Lohen passed him, he said, quietly: “Take care of yourself, kid.”
Lohen didn’t answer. He walked down the corridor without looking back, his spine straight and his expression composed and his heart doing something completely unacceptable in his chest.
He made it to his quarters. He closed the door. He stood in the middle of the room for a long time, his hands at his sides, and breathed.
He loved Varka. Varka knew. The feelings were mutual. Varka had refused to act on them until they could talk about it properly, like adults, like two people who respected each other enough to be honest about what they were walking into.
It was the most thoughtful, most considerate, most fundamentally Varka response to the situation that Lohen could have imagined.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and put his face in his hands.
He was going to have to have a conversation about his feelings. Out loud. With words. He had survived kidnappings, Abyss Heralds, forty enemy combatants, and his own biology.
This, he thought, might actually kill him.
Lohen returned to headquarters on a Tuesday.
He didn't wait until Wednesday. He didn't wait for his legs to stop feeling like they belonged to someone else, or for the residual fog of the heat to fully clear from his mind. He woke up at dawn, washed his face in cold water until his skin stung, dressed in his most immaculate uniform, and walked across the city with the grim determination of a man heading toward a firing squad.
He didn't go to the barracks. He didn't go to the training yard. He went straight to the Grand Master's office.
He didn't knock. He pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind him with a finality that made the latch click like a trigger.
Varka was at his desk, buried under the usual mountain of paperwork that seemed to spontaneously regenerate every time he looked away. He didn't look surprised to see Lohen. He didn't even look particularly concerned. He just leaned back in his chair, the wood groaning under his weight, and looked at Lohen with that steady, unhurried attention that had been haunting Lohen's dreams for a week.
"You're early," Varka said.
"I'm on time," Lohen said. "I'm ready to have the conversation."
Varka's gaze moved over him — assessing the set of his shoulders, the clarity of his eyes, the particular way he was holding himself. He seemed satisfied with what he saw. He gestured to the chair across from him.
"Sit down, Lohen."
Lohen sat. He didn't relax. He sat on the very edge of the chair, his hands flat on his thighs, his spine as straight as a spear.
"I have spent my entire life," Lohen began, his voice hard and precise, "refusing to be defined by what I am. I have fought my parents, my peers, my superiors, and my own body to ensure that no one — no one — could look at me and see only an omega. I have built a career, a reputation, and a life on the premise that I belong to myself and myself alone."
He looked at Varka, his crimson eyes burning. "If you think for one second that because I have feelings for you, I am going to become the kind of person who stays behind while you go to war — the kind of person who resigns his post to become a housewife and a broodmare — then you have understood nothing about me in all the years we've known each other."
Varka didn't interrupt. He didn't even blink. He just sat there and let Lohen's fury wash over him like a storm against a cliff.
"I will not be claimed," Lohen continued, his voice dropping to something quieter and more dangerous. "I will not be marked. I will not be a footnote in your legend. If this — if us — means I have to give up even a fraction of what I've bled for, then I would rather we never speak of it again. I would rather love you from across the training yard for the rest of my life and die alone than give you power over who I am."
The silence that followed was absolute. Lohen's chest heaved, the outburst having cost him more energy than he'd realized he had. He stared at Varka, his jaw tight, waiting for the dismissal. Waiting for the alpha to tell him he was being unreasonable, or emotional, or that he didn't understand how these things worked.
Varka didn't do any of those things.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his large hands clasped together. He looked at Lohen for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was quieter than Lohen had ever heard it.
"Is that what you think I want?" Varka asked.
Lohen's brow furrowed. "It's what everyone wants. It's how the world works."
"I'm not the world," Varka said, and there was a weight to the words that made Lohen's heart skip a beat. "And I'm not 'everyone.' I thought we'd established that by now."
He straightened slightly, his expression settling into something profoundly serious. "Lohen. Look at me."
Lohen looked.
"I am the Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius," Varka said. "I lead expeditions into the dark. I fight monsters that don't have names. I carry the responsibility for every life in this order on my shoulders every single day." He paused. "Why on Teyvat would I want to come home to someone who has no fire of their own? Why would I want a mate who exists only in my shadow?"
He reached out — slowly, giving Lohen every chance to pull away — and placed his hand on the desk between them, palm up. An invitation.
"I don't want a housewife," Varka said. "I have plenty of people to cook for me and clean my office. I don't want someone to stay behind. I want the man who poisoned my wine because he thought I was too arrogant. I want the person who charged forty Abyss Order operatives alone because he refused to believe he couldn't win. I want the Vice Captain of the Fifth Company, the sharpest arrow in Mondstadt, the man who argues with me until I'm blue in the face because he thinks his way is better."
His eyes were steady, unyielding. "I want you, Lohen. Exactly as you are. Furious, stubborn, reckless, and entirely too competent for your own good. I don't want to claim you. I want to stand beside you."
Lohen stared at him. The words were doing something to his chest that felt like a breach in a wall — a slow, inevitable crumbling of a defense he'd spent a lifetime building.
"And kids?" Lohen's voice was small, despite his best efforts. "The expectations? They'll… they’ll expect you to have a family."
"Let them expect," Varka said, with a shrug that dismissed the entire social structure of Mondstadt in a single movement. "I've been disappointing people's expectations since I was six years old. I'm quite good at it by now." He leaned in closer. "If we have children, it will be because we decided we wanted them. Because we thought the world could use a few more lunatics like us. And if we don't? Then we don't. The Knights of Favonius, Mondstadt will survive. My legacy isn't in my blood, Lohen. It's in the people I've trained and the city I've protected. And yours is the same."
Lohen looked at Varka's hand on the desk. Large, scarred, steady. The hand of a man who had never once used his strength to make Lohen feel small.
"You're serious," Lohen whispered.
"I told you," Varka said. "I'm always serious about things that matter."
Lohen breathed. It felt like the first real breath he'd taken in weeks. The fear was still there — he wasn't naive enough to think it would just vanish — but it was no longer the only thing in the room. There was space now. Space for something else.
"I'd be a terrible mother," Lohen said, his voice trembling just a fraction. "I'd fuck up their childhoods. I'd teach them how to make poison before they could walk."
Varka laughed — the real laugh, the one that made the room feel smaller and warmer. "And I'd teach them how to swing a greatsword before they could talk. They'd be the most dangerous toddlers in the history of the Seven Nations. It would be magnificent."
He looked at Lohen, his expression softening into that quiet, unguarded fondness. "You wouldn't be a conventional mother, Lohen. But you wouldn't be a terrible one, either. You're loyal, you're protective, and you have a sense of justice that's as sharp as your spear. Any child would be lucky to have that watching over them."
Lohen looked away, his eyes stinging. He hated this. He hated the vulnerability, the way his throat felt tight, the way his heart was pounding against his ribs like a trapped bird. He hated that Varka could do this to him with nothing but words.
And he loved it. He loved it so much it made him feel lightheaded.
"I'm not resigning," Lohen said, his voice regaining its edge. "I'm keeping my post. I'm keeping my rank. And if you ever try to pull rank on me in our personal life, I will actually poison you this time. Not with a sedative. With something that tastes like bitter almonds and ends with a funeral."
"I would expect nothing less," Varka said.
Lohen reached out. His hand was smaller than Varka's, his skin paler, his fingers calloused from years of spear-work and bow-strings. He placed his hand in Varka's open palm.
The contact was electric. It wasn't the pull of instinct — it was the weight of a promise.
Varka's fingers closed around his, firm and warm and certain. He didn't pull Lohen toward him. He just held him there, across the desk, in the quiet office with the morning light streaming through the windows.
"So," Varka said. "Are we doing this?"
Lohen looked at him — at the man who had seen everything he was and decided it was exactly what he wanted. At the alpha who had waited for him to be ready. At the person who had turned his world upside down and then offered him a hand to help him stand.
"Yes," Lohen said. "We're doing this."
He paused, a small, sharp grin touching his lips.
"But if you ever call me 'honey' in front of the other knights, I'm joining the Fatui."
Varka laughed, and the sound of it filled the room, and for the first time in his life, Lohen didn't feel like he was fighting for his life.
He felt like he was starting it.
The Knights of Favonius would talk, of course. There would be whispers in the mess hall, and raised eyebrows in the training yard, and a great deal of confusion about how the most bloodthirsty omega in Mondstadt had ended up mated to the Grand Master. There would be those who expected Lohen to change, and those who waited for him to fail, and those who simply couldn't wrap their heads around the two of them together.
Lohen didn't care.
He had his spear. He had his rank. He had his seat at the table. And he had the man who looked at him and saw not an omega, not a weapon, but Lohen.
The arrow had found its mark.
And for the first time, it didn't feel like it had been shot. It felt like it had arrived.