Chapter Text
A loud click and muffled noise caught the attention of the hundreds of passersby. They all collectively looked up towards the large screen that stayed blank. The speakers began to crackle to life as a conversation began to be broadcasted.
"Gods! He's here, Barbatos. Look at him. That stupid smile, his disgustingly gorgeous eyes that seem to pierce into your soul-" An excitable voice was rambling when the audio cleared.
"Bestie, you're rambling again," A higher pitched voice responded.
"Gah, goddamn it. Whatever."
The sound of rustling was heard from somewhere far away.
"How do I look, Barbatos? Evilly stunning? Please tell me my ass is perky."
"Lively and perky, sir!" A sharp hiccup very reminiscent of someone very drunk was heard.
"Ah gods, you haven't been drinking on the job again, have you?"
Barbatos laughed without a care in the world. "No sir~ HIC"
"I…” The audience heard a tired sigh. “Let's just get this show on the road."
There was a pause.
"Barbatos… did you already connect the microphone to the town center's speakers?"
"It's always good to be early, sir!"
The screen flickered on and the city gasped at the sight of a tall man, clad in tight-fitting black shiny leather and adorning a long galactic cape that seemed to extend out and upwards from his figure. Messy ginger hair peeked out from above the red mask that covered the man’s chest. If he angled his person just right at the camera, one could see his little inverted belly button. Traveling down to his thigh, he adorned a thigh-strap, visibly more tight than his leather pants. It was a wonder it didn’t cut off circulation to his left leg, though if he had experience with wearing such an accessory regularly.
Although his body language exuded an air of confidence, hands on his hips and head held high, the unwilling audience could sense a hint of embarrassment. A few members of the audience blushed at the sight of a skin-tight bodysuit and turned away, coughing intermittently and leaving the man on the screen a little puzzled as to their sudden reaction.
One man in particular, who had happened to situate himself on the hotseat of this cultural cesspool in the middle of town, stared at the screen with an unintelligible expression. A hand covered his mouth to hide what was assumed to be a frown. Had anyone looked closer though, they would have seen a twinking of mirth behind his eyes.
The man cleared his throat and smirked at his decked out counterpart on the large city screen overlooking his domain. The display of amusement left the other irked, his mouth gaping open slightly in indignation.
He snapped out of his stupefied state to point down at the camera. "M-Morax! I've come to announce your demise. I have created a scenario so foul, so dastardly, that not even you could escape it.”
With an gleefully evil laugh, he turned to the side to let the camera settle on a blond man with a long braid tied up with an extremely bored expression on his face.
"Help," he said with a sarcastic drawl.
"Please be a little more enthusiastic with this." The masked man sighed.
"Sorry it's just… this is like the third time this week."
“C’mon, Aether.” The cloaked man stood there, staring at the bound man. A whine was evident in his voice as he practically begged his captive to cry for help.
Aether sighed from his dangling position. "Fine, fine. Oh no… help. I've been trapped in the Golden House… again."
"I really miss your early days, honestly. The pleas for help were so much more vibrant."
"Sorry, I'm a washed up silver screen one hit wonder."
"I'm going to ignore that snarky comment in favor of getting that scaly bastard to come save you." He whispered, but it was loud enough for the microphone to pick the audio up and play it for the audience. Why he was so bad at being secretive, the crowd would never know.
Morax rose from his seat amongst the crowd, brushing off the hands of the adoring citizens and levitating to the center of attention. His arm stretched out, blackened with pure geo streaming in geometric lines. His torso was adorned with white latex, almost obscenely tight against his muscular figure, rimmed with gold. The white latex spanned out behind him, the gold lining spiraling into geometric patterns. His extremely loose brown pants flowed out along with his top, gradually sharing the same geometric patterns that adorned the end of his torso’s tailcoat. A white hood perfectly framed his face, letting his amber-tipped hair cascade around his mask, reminiscent of masquerades. It was a black mold accented by more golden patterns, only making his red liner even more noticeable.
His perfectly chiseled face smiled, "well, if you wanted to see me so badly, Tartaglia, then I, Morax, will come to you."
"I-I didn't say anything about wanting to see you. Stupid bastard, I'm here to end you! Gah. Whatever." Tartaglia sputtered, confident demeanor quickly evaporating into embarrassment.
"Is that so… Hm, well then," Morax looked away from Tartaglia's face on the screen to the back of him, "Aether, don't worry. I, Morax, am coming to save you. As for you, Tartaglia, you won’t be getting off that easy."
“Promise? I hope I’ll be getting off at all.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t plan on it.”
“Oh really? What are you gonna do, stop me?”
“Oh, I can stop you from getting off, alright. You’re not allowed to until I say you can.”
“And how will you make sure of that?”
“Come, I dare you. Then you can find out.” Morax stopped the conversation there. He hoped that that was good enough for the audience. Tartaglia was not faring well, covering his masked face with his hands and looking away from the camera.
Morax struck his most heroic pose and sped off in the direction of the Golden House as Aether muttered a soft swear.
The sudden shift of focus from him to Aether made the self-proclaimed villain a little peeved.
Oh poor Tartaglia, the crowd thought. He's gone and done it again. Deflecting any of our savior's obvious flirting and then being pushed to the side in favor of Aether. At the sight of Tartaglia’s slumped shoulders and Barbatos’ hand patting his back, the audience all felt a collective tinge of pity for the “villain.”
Tartaglia's heartbroken face that day practically became a meme on the internet as the less sympathetic crowd took to plastering it on every surface the next day after Aether was inevitably saved. A video of a very tense musical number as the hero and villain broke into song was also posted to TikTok, reaching 22.5 million likes in the first day.
And so, this plot ended tragically. Tartaglia felt cheated and thrown to the side in favor of Aether.
He grabbed a match from his matchbox and stared at it from his evilly stylish overlord's chair.
So maybe his plot was a little underthought since Tartaglia really wanted Morax to be physically in front of him for his grand finale.
He walked to the east side of the room, lighting the match carefully.
Ugh, he spent a whole two weeks writing that song and that handsome Geo user just had a perfect baritone that he wouldn't mind hearing in a much different situa-
He paused in front of the drawer, widening his eyes at the picture situated in the center.
Absolutely fucking not. Yes, Morax was one of the hottest people he had ever laid eyes on. But his goal was full world domination! He had plans after taking over Liyue and a relationship would just hold him back, especially with a guy so rooted towards justice. Tartaglia cringed at the thought of dating someone so morally pure.
He lit the candles. Then he paused again.
Wait a second, who said anything about relationships?! And with Morax to boot. Yeah, not in a million years. He would never date that hero.
He blew out the candles in front of his Morax shrine, choosing to not acknowledge the irony of his actions.
Time to get back on track. He needed a new plan to take over Liyue and defeat Morax. Tartaglia thought about it for a few moments, trying to think of a new idea that he hadn’t tried yet.
Oh, what about a tentacle monster…
He quickly took out his phone, looking at the national villains-for-hire website. Why that existed he wouldn’t know, but it proved helpful for times like these where he was fresh out of ideas for a new scheme. He filtered the search results for tentacle monsters and scrolled a bit until he came upon a very interesting individual.
Osial… why was that name so familiar?
~~~~~
Morax stared out his high-rise luxury window, expression bored and unhappy. Then he heard the blades of a helicopter nearby and he pounced up, fixing his hair and schooling his face into a practiced friendly smile.
The cameraman in the window immediately flashed the camera at the disheveled city hero in his black silk bathrobe and slippers.
He really fucking hated this job.
"Hero Morax! Do you have a moment?!" The man fought to be heard through the bullet-proof glass and the whir of the blades above him.
He should have taken the mask off. Why did he forget to take the mask off?
Realistically, people would immediately realize who he was even with the mask, but Liyue has proven to be somewhat… less intelligent when pressed with the matter of an attractive hero and the prospects of yet another gay shipping fest with his nemesis.
He enjoyed reading fanfiction from time to time, often showing himself and Tartaglia to be hidden lovers in their real identities. He had come across plenty of tropes that would cause plenty of tension. It all started as a joke but now, he actually enjoyed reading them and would sometimes actively look for them in his free time.
Funnily enough, he had also been mistaken for various celebrities and businessmen, but never his actual identity. Perhaps only twice had he found himself mentioned and he could almost entirely bet they were from Aether's sister, Lumine and her neverending goal to torment him and Tartaglia. It wasn't that she herself introduced the ship, but she became a prominent writer in the context of pairing Morax and Tartaglia together. She was incredibly bright as well, almost immediately realizing his true identity as Zhongli during one of his public speaking events. Instead of leaking it to the press, she instead embezzled money out of him for silence, as well as full authority to have intel on his daily life for more material in her fanfictions.
A notification popped up on his phone. "Speak of the devil and she shall appear…"
He tapped the button to let her in, shutting the blinds on his giant windows overlooking the city. The public only knew that "Morax" lived here. They knew nothing of Zhongli, CEO of Gold Exchange Order, or GEO for short, and his whereabouts. Not that they’d care, the world was focused on Morax more than some odd billionaire.
She strolled right on in through the front door, casually dropping her bag off at the front and proceeding to chastise Zhongli about his performance earlier that day. “... and I can’t believe you just fucking cut the conversation off there. Like a head tilt or something?” She ran a hand through her hair in frustration.
Zhongli looked up from his phone to acknowledge her. “Yes.” He wasn’t paying much attention to her. Lumine’s arrival reminded him of her new chapter out on AO3 and he had been waiting impatiently to read it. Come to think of it, today had been close to a rendition of the previous chapter she released last week. It was a very tasteful chapter that he very much enjoyed.
It was difficult for him to find decent fanfiction because of his very specific tastes: accuracy and sophistication. Some days, he would scroll through a poorly written oneshot for fun but he would ultimately have to go back to one of Lumine’s previous fics. Thank the gods she was a fast writer, otherwise he’d be suffering for more content each day.
Lumine kept staring at him for about five minutes as he went through his fanfiction chapters. She got increasingly impatient to the point where she grabbed the phone out of his hand and stared him down until he provided the most eloquent response ever constructed by mankind, “guh huh…?”
“Zhongli, hey, I’ve been standing here for about five minutes giving you critiques on your performance and the only thing you’ve done is look at your goddamn phone.” She waved his phone in the air carelessly, ready to let it drop to the ground and shatter at any moment. All Zhongli did in that moment was shuffle his feet uncomfortably, ashamed of being chastised like this by someone a few years younger than him.
Seeing he wasn’t particularly fazed, she sighed and brought out her own phone, scrolling to the little news excerpt she had written when she realized Morax’s true identity. This time, she waved her own phone in his face. “Wouldn’t want this out in public, yeah?” He looked away to the side to avoid reading it like a petulant child.
“You wouldn’t want Tartaglia finding out, would you?” Lumine teased. Zhongli paused, a flash of panic running through his body from those words.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
She smirked in satisfaction, “Oh yes I would.”
He sighed, “Fine.”
So for the next two hours, the CEO of GEO, billionaire extraordinaire, Morax’s hidden persona, Zhongli, was schooled on the art of flirting in battle. She left him a much more knowledgeable man.
But like any class, he stored all that information into the back of his brain, quickly jumping back onto his phone to scroll through the mortaglia tag on Twitter. Addiction acquired.
~~~~~
A week later, he was back patrolling the streets in his superhero persona. Unfortunately, he was stuck doing menial tasks like putting some twelve year old hotshot gangster into a juvenile detention center or signing autographs for the fifth time in three days. He had tons of paperwork piling up at his desk from his actual job. Could it be considered a night job at this point? He spent more time in his latex than in his cotton suit back at his office.
He was sighing and running a hand down his face when his phone sounded in another notification. Warily, he opened his phone, praying to the gods it wasn’t another godforsaken signing booth that his publicity manager and best friend, Guizhong, had booked for him.
However, today the gods smiled down upon him as he read the notification.
[The Hero After Hours by Illumination has a new chapter available.]
Fuck the gods, he was smiling down at Lumine’s offering.
He quickly opened the chapter, oblivious to the fact he was sitting on his own statue in the middle of town square. The last chapter had been left off at a cliffhanger, so he had been waiting for a new update to see what would happen next.
And by the first few words of the chapter, he nearly dropped his phone down the 30 meter drop.
Holy shit. Expertly done plot twist. Lumine, 5 stars. Chef’s kiss.
Then the gears started turning in his brain. This… this could liberate him from this stupid fate.