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Even on birthdays, Tartaglia is the one who makes himself the celebratory breakfast in the morning.
His mother, often too busy with the aquarium though visitors came few and far inbetween, sleeps through most mornings. But Tartaglia wakes up at six to prepare and shuffle all the little ones out the door, then comes home from training at ten only to fall asleep at midnight. The Fatui has him stretched as far as they can; the simple task of keeping the home in order would only raise his praises among the diplomats, because a kind man makes for a kinder mask.
But when he wakes up and yawns and rubs his eyes as he walks into the kitchen on his eighteenth birthday, there is the smell of nearly-burnt eggs filling the air.
What a swell birthday present.
“Tonia!” He rushes from the doorway to the stove in seconds, turning off the stove and pulling his sister’s hand away from the charred pan. She stands idly in the corner of the kitchen, watching Tartaglia toss the pan into the sink before turning to her more awake than ever.
“You—” How could he be out of breath after running a mere five steps from the door to Tonia? Maybe it was the flames, the sight of her so close to them, “—Tonia, you have to be more careful when you’re cooking. You could’ve gotten hurt.”
He does not tell her about the pan so charred he’ll likely have to throw in the dumpster, the burnt eggs glued to the pan, or the puffs of smoke haunting the kitchen’s air. He does not have the heart to tell her because children are smarter than he can fathom, but Tartaglia assumes she knows when he shuffles over to the sink to open up a window.
She stares down at the floor, her voice smaller than she is. “I’m sorry, Glia… I just…” When she finally blesses him with her gaze, he understands why she stared at the floor— her eyes water, an arrow straight to the heart of a Tartaglia who always forgives, always forgets. “I wanted to make you breakfast for your birthday…”
He almost wants to cry with her. He doesn’t even like eggs.
Tartaglia kneels down to match her height, ruffling the tufts of her hair and flicking away the incoming tears in her eyes with a smile. The Fatui have drilled into his mind that intentions do not equal results; but when his little sister is so dedicated to making him eggs for his birthday that she nearly unknowingly burns their home down, how could he continue to think that way?
In the family home, the mask is hidden under his bed and tucked away out of view. To the rest of Snezhnaya he may be Childe, the youngest of all Harbingers; but to Tonia and the others he is Tartaglia, their heroic eldest brother who likes to dust their old family photos during his minutes of free time.
Intentions mean nothing if they are not carried out as promised, the Fatui say, but in this home there is no Fatui, and there is only Tartaglia.
“Do you want to make pancakes with me instead, Tonia?” He grins when Tonia’s expression flips instantly, her smile ear-to-ear. “I appreciate that you were trying to cook me breakfast, but I think the best birthday present is cooking it with me, right?”
Tonia nods excitedly— as expected, because Tartaglia’s birthday gift to the rest of the family would be their favorite breakfast, of course.
They stand in front of the stove with a new pan, a new spoon, new smiles on their faces as Tonia watches him try (and fail) to flip two pancakes at once, and then new pancake batter is added to the mix.
“Glia is sooooo bad at flipping pancakes!” Tonia laughs, and for a moment Tartaglia’s competitive streak kicks in as he hands her the pan.
He flips an invisible pancake with an invisible pan in his visible hand’s grasp, gesturing to Tonia to follow. But when she does, because she is lighter than Tartaglia and the pan is heavier in her grip, the pancake doesn’t get too far— in fact, it finds a new home flopping onto Tonia’s face before hitting the ground.
Tartaglia tilts his head. Looks at it sideways, then from Tonia’s upside-down angle for closer inspection.
“It kind of looks like your face, don’t you think? Got the tiny nose and everything.” He points to the small indent in the middle of the pancake, then Tonia’s button-like nose before bursting into laughter.
Then suddenly he’s bombarded by the absolute onslaught of playful slaps from his little sister as she laughs with him, and Tartaglia decides that this is the birthday present he wanted the most.
When Childe wakes up, the bed is empty except for his presence within it and the upturned blanket on the other half of the bed. But then the clock above the door tells him that it is already ten in the morning— and instantly Childe’s slippers are on and he’s out the door.
There is noise in the kitchen, and he scouts it out as if the kitchen was his own. There is the smell of eggs floating throughout the air, and Childe follows it as if they were burning.
There is a child in the kitchen, next to the man who left him behind with his tumbleweed of a blanket. He recognizes her and her lilac braid— Qiqi, was it? Zhongli’s presence besides her makes her look so much smaller, or maybe makes Zhongli look so much larger, but together they are working as one, talking together as though they are equals.
“I haven’t cooked something as simple as this in a long time,” Zhongli admits. From the doorway of the kitchen where Childe silently stands, there’s solely an egg on the pan, and it’s not even close to burning.
Next to him, Qiqi perks up. “Do you think you could make it a cocoegg, Zhongli?”
Zhongli stops. Childe just about loses it.
“I… I think Childe would appreciate coconut milk as a beverage instead, little miss Qiqi. Perhaps next time, with Childe’s guidance, we could figure out the inner workings of a possible cocoegg dish.”
When Childe finally lets out the loudest laughter he’s had since the original incident, he’s met with two pairs of stoic, unmoving eyes. They really were alike— two immortal beings, rather forgetful, more powerful than they seem.
If Childe were to describe them, he’d think of them as brother… and sister.
“Childe,” Zhongli beams at him like the light he radiates with every smile, “Happy birthday.”
“Happy birthday…!” Qiqi chimes in with two jumps up and down. “Mr. Zhongli made you this breakfast… Qiqi hopes you like it.”
After Zhongli shuffles him into a seat at his dining table, there are three foods presented to him:
A cup of coconut milk, joyfully placed before him by Qiqi. She looks so proud and pleased when she does so, that Childe doesn’t have the heart to tell her he’s allergic.
A plate with two eggs. They are not burnt, cooked with precision much like all things Zhongli does.
A stack of pancakes.
He trembles at the sight of it.
“Happy birthday!” Qiqi says once more, clapping her hands as she cheers and giggles. Later, when he asks Zhongli why the girl was in his home, Zhongli will say that Qiqi loves birthdays. She loves the repetition of things, because she is repetition personified.
But her laughter is not like hers, the eggs are not burnt like hers, the pancakes are cooked exactly to the recipe unlike his where Tartaglia would throw in whatever his sisters and brother loves to appease their heavy judgements.
“This is your first birthday in Liyue,” Zhongli explains in the chair besides him, “So I wanted to keep it simple. I wanted to replicate how birthdays in Snezhnaya were for you.”
Ever since his abrupt and secret departure from the Harbingers and the Fatui as a whole, Childe walks the streets of Liyue Harbor like a man expecting to drop dead at any moment. There was a contract signed between him and Her Majesty, though nonverbal and more or less assumed of him unlike how Zhongli prefers to handle contracts:
“The Fatui depends on you, my Childe. And your family depends on you too, do they not? Then the Fatui would be your family also, and would you ever leave the family?”
In layman’s terms, Childe is the warding sign that keeps the ghosts of the Fatui from wiggling into the cracks of his home, the singular barrier that keeps their influence out of their innocent minds, though he is one of the paragons himself.
( Was the warding sign. He is not Fatui anymore, and now there is no warding charm.)
Childe nods. He cannot argue; Zhongli can grasp the concept of eggs and pancakes as a celebratory breakfast, but he could never capture Tonia’s grin as she watches him flip a pancake, or the way Theodore’s eyes light up when he finds that his big brother gave him a gift on his own birthday.
He can try to replicate the concept of a little sister, but Qiqi’s laughter is not like hers.
Tonia’s was her own melody.
“Right. Thank you.”
Before he does anything else, Childe grabs an extra plate— and places one of his own pancakes on the ceramic. Carefully, he makes an indent in the very middle, then looks at it sideways and upside-down.
Zhongli asks no questions when Childe places the plate next to his own, with a fork reserved for the pancake no one will ever eat.