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If Lumine was thankful for one thing after Childe showed his true face, it was that at least he was easier to deal with.
Oh, he'd definitely been more polite before; all smiles and friendliness, helpful to a fault. But that had always been, if not a mask, then at least a carefully edited version of himself. A pretense at being harmless.
This, the person he was now? This was real.
His smile was sharp and hungry in a way that he never would have revealed of himself before the fight at the Golden House. He paced along the grass as they sized each other up.
He was dangerous, and Lumine had had a taste of just how much, but she at least knew how to handle dangerous.
They circled each other once more before Childe broke the stalemate first, sending an arrow Lumine's way. It wasn't even a serious attack, just a little prodding gesture to spur her into action, but Lumine took the cue regardless, and dashed to close the distance. She dodged the quick flurry of arrows darting past her, and when she was upon him, Childe's bow had already turned to blades instead. He bore down on her with his full weight, blades hissing against one another as they slid together.
As Lumine expected, he took sparring as seriously as a real battle; he did strike her as the type either way: whether from strict self-discipline or heady enthusiasm for the art of battle. He was a confounding mix of both, just as she'd discovered that his friendliness was no less feigned than his enmity.
They broke apart in a burst of Anemo, but he didn't lose his balance as much as Lumine would have liked, and barely missed a step as he parried.
During their first battle against one another, at the Golden House, Lumine had been more circumspect in her fighting, maintaining distance and attacking when caution told her she could land a hit.
Sparring, though--
With nothing to lose and nothing to gain, they fought more to test one another. They exchanged a flurry of blows, quick and sharp, and maintaining a steady assault at one another to see who would step back first. She dodged under his guard, rolled behind him, and sent a burst of Anemo at his back. He made a choked sound in his throat--the only sign he'd been taken by surprised, because he used the momentum of the wind tossing him to roll across the grass and back to his feet, blades turning to bow again as he used the distance now created to shoot at her.
He was pulling out some tricks that Lumine hadn't seen before. She'd be tempted to think he was showing off, but it was just as likely that he had decided to expand his repertoire to compensate for times when he was not able to use the Foul Legacy Transformation. As Lumine had learned herself, limitations were conducive to creativity. Now Lumine used the terrain, running up along a jutting stone and throwing herself into a plunging attack. She narrowly missed Childe, but he was still thrown off by the shockwave of it.
The field around them smelled like cut grass; bursts of wind and sharp flicks of water had sheared the ground bald in places, and the rest had been trampled underfoot. Hopefully nobody needed this random field outside Liyue Harbor to stay intact, because they were making quite the mess.
The fight lulled again, as they jumped apart and circled one another again.
Childe was grinning, his face full of a happiness that seemed to bloom from the inside. It was in moments like these that Lumine thought she understood how someone like him might become a Harbinger just for the joy of battle. He hadn't been so happy in the execution of his duties as he was now, fighting just for the sake of it. That was another thing that made him easier to understand.
"Hey, don't drift off in the middle of a fight," he chided. "Come on, take this seriously."
"You're the one with a smile on your face," she pointed out.
If anything, though, his grin grew wider. His gaze very deliberately went up and down her body, and Lumine felt it like electricity over her skin.
"That's how you know I'm paying attention," he purred in response.
It was hard to tell if he meant it as a sparring partner assessing his rival, or as some kind of innuendo, but like the way he seemed to balance all the other contradictions in his character, Lumine suspected it was both.
They came at one another again, exchanging blows as they did, and this time, they kept locked close tearing at each other. Anemo and Hydro combined into a cutting spray, cold and sharp enough to tear at their skin, and still they pushed.
It could have gone either way, but Childe was the first to falter. Lumine was close enough to see the twinge of pain on his face, and she pushed her advantage, with a burst of Anemo that knocked the air out of him.
He double over with a wheeze, water blades dissolving in his hands.
This was where Lumine should have kneed him in the face as a follow-up blow--and probably would have, ordinarily, except Childe's breathing was coming in sharp and genuinely pained in a way she hadn't been expecting. So, because this was a sparring match, because she was not looking to actually hurt him, she hesitated. She opened her mouth to make some query of concern, ask if he needed to stop--
And that was when he headbutted her.
She staggered back, hand to her forehead as her vision whited out in pain, and by the time she blinked the spots from her eyes, he'd already advanced on her and grabbed her wrist, ready to take her sword from her hand. She released the hilt, and it glimmered out of existence. If she couldn't use it, then neither would he.
He was still holding her wrist, and neither had called an end to the match, so they proceeded to the next logical step, which was to say grappling at one another, weaponless and utterly clumsy because apparently neither one actually knew any hand to hand combat. Lumine threw herself at him bodily, sending the both of them sprawling to the ground.
In the ensuing roll across the ground--which resembled rough-housing more than sparring by quite a loud margin--they both shrieked, the overflow of adrenaline turning into hysterical laughter as they realized their descent into the ridiculous.
Childe ended up on top of Lumine as the struggle came to an end, pinning her legs under one of his, and each wrist above her head. Lumine was laughing so hard, she could barely draw in a proper breath, much less struggle, and Childe, despite having the advantage, was laughing similarly hard, and looked ready to topple off her.
This was not precisely the most climactic end to a fight, but as their laughter echoed over the mountains, it certainly felt like a good end to it.
The laughter tapered off, leaving only the silence between them.
Lumine looked up at Childe, Childe looked at her in turn. He did not make a single move to release her, but in the quiet, they looked at one another, and the longer this went on, the more hyper-aware Lumine started to become of their position. A squirming, hot feeling in her belly made her think she ought to look away from him, but Childe's eyes--as blue as a glacial mountain lake--were keeping her pinned.
What was he thinking right now? His face was unreadable, a blank mask as he stared at her. She stared back because she couldn't look away, but the longer this strange silence extended, the longer they stayed in this position, the more awkward it was going to be when they moved apart.
Yet the moment seemed to draw out anyway, stuck in its strange equilibrium, and it felt like the brink of something happening. Anything happening.
When Childe finally moved, it was to release Lumine's wrists, but he still propped himself on his elbows above her, body pressed against hers with just enough weight to it that Lumine would have had to push him away if she wanted to escape.
Did she want that...?
No. If she wanted anything, it was to see where this was going.
He brushed a thumb over her cheek, hand cradling the side of her face gently. His expression melted from its blankness into something softer, but distantly sad.
"I have something for you," he said abruptly.
"...Okay," Lumine replied, blinking.
He scrambled off of her, that awkwardness that Lumine anticipated already catching up to him. They both sat upright in the grass. Lumine crossed her legs, and he coughed in embarrassment before reaching into his pocket to take out a key.
It was small, barely as long as Lumine's thumb, and had a number carved into it.
"It's for a drop-box at Northland Bank," he explained.
"I don't really have anything to store," she said.
"Not that kind of box," Childe said. "It's for letters. Northland Bank is a drop-off location for incoming and outgoing mail on the diplomatic channels. It's far more reliable and faster than regular mail delivery."
"A fact you take advantage of," Lumine surmised. He probably used it to send letters home to his siblings.
"There are perks to being with the Fatui, I won't pretend otherwise," he said, smirking and shrugging as he did. Then his expression turned to something marginally more serious. "I thought... if you wanted, we could..."
"Exchange letters?" Lumine raised an eyebrow.
Childe's shrug this time was helpless, his shoulders sloping into a posture of feigned indifference, as if he was already bracing himself to show how much a rejection wouldn't hurt him.
"I assume you're not going to be the only one reading these letters," Lumine said.
"Now why would you think that?" Childe asked a bit too innocently.
Lumine didn't have to elaborate on how much she distrusted the Fatui, but she still leveled a deadpan stare at Childe. This was a trap as much as it was a sincere offer. Like everything else about Childe.
"I suppose," she said, "I will have to write about very uninteresting things. Serves you right."
She tucked the key away, and Childe's smile turned bright and warm, and she tried very hard not to think the word 'compromised' about either one of them.