Work Text:
[lumine (tiny future wife)]
so uh… do you happen to know anything about taking nudes?
Childe blinks. And then blinks again, just in case the first time didn’t work, but the words on the screen don’t change. This is—definitely not a text he ever expected to receive from Lumine.
He doesn’t answer it. But he does find out that it takes less than five minutes to get from Northland Bank to Wangshu Inn if you know how to get creative with a vision. (Ekaterina is most likely not going to appreciate the pile of unfinished work he left behind, but she’s long overdue for a raise anyway.)
By the time Childe reaches Lumine’s floor, he’s breathing hard, and he has to lean on the door frame before he can bring himself to knock.
A wide-eyed Lumine opens the door. “Childe?” she says. “I thought I heard something.”
Yeah, well. He might have broken a stair or two on the way up. Whatever. “Girlie,” he says, barely managing not to stumble his way inside. “If you needed Mora, you should’ve just told me.”
“What? I don’t need M—”
“We always need more Mora,” Lumine’s tiny floating friend cheerfully interrupts. Childe turns to glare at her. “You,” he says, eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you supposed to be her guide in Teyvat? How could you let her resort to such lowly means to make a living?”
“Lowly means?” Paimon blinks. “But she hasn’t done anything like that.”
“Childe, what’s this about?” Lumine asks, arms crossed over her chest. “You should—you should probably sit down. You look pale.”
That—doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, actually. “Wait,” he says. “Wait, the—the text you sent me.”
“Oh.” Realization dawns on Lumine’s face, and she smiles. “That was for a commission. There’s, uh, well, I guess I’ve gained quite the reputation here in Liyue. People come to ask for help with pretty much everything.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’d need to know how to do—that,” Childe says, mouth pursed.
“This lady wanted—wanted to surprise her husband, I think?” Lumine says. There’s the faintest bit of red on her cheeks, and if he wasn’t still trying to catch his breath, Childe would smile. She can take down dozens of mitachurls without breaking a sweat, but stuff like this gets to her. It’s alarmingly cute.
“And you agreed? That’s not a standard commission, Lumine.” One of these days, he’s going to sit her down and have a nice, long talk about establishing boundaries. Or—raising her commission rate, at least.
Lumine bites at her lip. “I know,” she says. “I just—I wanted to help.”
Childe sighs. “There is such a thing as too much helping, girlie. Even though you seem convinced otherwise.”
“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” Lumine says. “The regular commissions I do for the Guild are enough to pay for dinner, but they’re all...” She huffs. “They’re all kind of boring. Like, how many times can you possibly fix the same staircase? At least stuff like this is a little more fun.”
Paimon nods. “One time, we even got to match-make,” she says, eyes sparkling. “Granted, it didn’t actually work, but we got to try it!”
Well… no one could fault them for lacking optimism. “I’m, uh, glad you two are having fun,” Childe says. “I still, I mean—I don’t really see how I’m suited to help.”
Red blossoms across Lumine’s cheeks. “Um,” she says. “I kind of figured you’d—”
“It was the hipbones, wasn’t it,” Paimon interrupts knowingly. The way she’s staring at his vision is starting to make Childe feel remarkably uncomfortable. He resists the urge to tug at the blanket on Lumine’s bed just to cover himself.
“The hipbones?” he echoes.
Paimon nods seriously. Behind her, Lumine facepalms. “Mm,” she says. “You agree too, don’t you, Lumine? I mean, remember what you said after you drank too much of Venti’s Dandelion wine? You kept talking about his b—”
“Alright!” Lumine says, loudly clapping both hands together. “Why don’t you, uh, go eat some Sticky Honey Roast, Paimon?”
“Can Paimon really? But just yesterday you were saying we shouldn’t spend more Mora than we need to.”
“Yeah, well,” Lumine says. “I’m sure Xiangling will make some for you. Besides you… you deserve it, Paimon. For… for being such a great guide and travel companion!”
Convincing. Very convincing.
“Aw,” Paimon says, teary-eyed, “Paimon knew you didn’t mean all those times you called her emergency food.”
Childe waits until she has floated happily out the door to turn towards Lumine, raise a single eyebrow, and ask, “What was that all about?”
Lumine’s shoulders slump. “Look,” she says, some of the tension finally leaving her. “You’d think wine made from dandelions wouldn’t, you know, be that strong. Anyway, please take your shirt off.”
She says this last bit with a tone of voice not at all unlike the one Ekaterina uses when she asks him to finish overdue paperwork.
Childe chokes on air. “I happen to prefer dinner first,” he says.
Lumine glares at him. “I need practice, Childe.”
“Practice? Girlie, I already told you that if you’re short on Mora—”
“I could at least give that lady some pointers on, like, angles and lighting, you know?” Lumine says, teeth worrying at her bottom lip. “It’s silly. I know it’s silly. But I like—I like feeling useful, at least, even if it’s for stuff like this. If I just sat around all day waiting for news on the Inazuma situation or—I think I’d go mad, you know?”
“And,” Childe says, “just to rephrase, you sanity is currently directly linked to how willing I am to take my shirt off?”
“Yes!” Lumine says, full of enthusiasm, before catching herself. “I mean—it would help. Unless you’re uncomfortable. You obviously don’t have to if you’re uncomfortable.”
Admittedly, this wasn’t how he had thought Lumine asking him to take his clothes off would go. Not that he had thought about it. (Well… maybe once. Or twice. There might have been a picnic by the shore involved.)
“I can do it,” he says, because not rushing into things without figuring a way out has evidently never been his strong suit. “Unless you want to ask someone else.”
“No,” Lumine says, too quickly. “It was—it was hard enough to ask you. Besides… we’re friends, aren’t we?”
Her smile is small and tentative, and Childe can’t help but return it. “Yeah,” he says, “we’re friends.” In the back of his mind, a voice that sounds annoyingly like Signora’s whispers Whipped. He tells it to shut up and go throw knives at the new recruits or something.
“So…” he says.
Lumine blinks. “Your shirt,” she says.
There has to be a better way to let a girl know you like her than agreeing to let her practice taking semi-nudes on you so she can give someone else pointers on lighting and angles. God. Childe obviously has yet to find it. (Maybe flowers? His mother did always say that flowers were a wonderful gift.)
It’s—definitely strange, watching Lumine silently follow the trail of buttons as he undoes them one by one, until there aren’t any left. For a few painfully long seconds she just stares, mouth slightly parted, before shaking her head firmly and tearing her eyes off him to rummage through her travel bag. For a Kamera, Childe guesses.
“You wouldn’t be having these issues in Fontaine or Snezhnaya,” he says, mostly to distract himself from the sharp awareness of the fact that he’s half naked. “We’re way better about new technology.”
Lumine shrugs. “Haven’t you noticed people are a little attached to tradition here in Liyue? At least they’re making an effort.” She lifts the camera halfway up before pausing. “You,” she says, “you don’t have that many—I mean, your chest…”
“My chest?”
“Scars,” she says, almost a shout. Then, quieter, “You don’t have that many scars. I thought—”
Childe laughs. It would be bitter, with anyone else. He can see the concern in her eyes, though. The worry that lurks behind the open curiosity. It shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s never been afraid of him. Not like everyone else. “I’m good at what I do,” he says. “You get the scars when you’re not.”
I’m kind of a bad guy.
It’s still true, even if she makes it almost easy to forget. Makes him wish he could pack his whole life up and just—be with her. Travel. Keep her safe. Keep her warm at night. Keep her steady through the storms, because there are always storms. He knows that better than anyone.
“I’m glad you are,” she says.
Childe blinks. This too, shouldn’t be a surprise. Lumine is nothing if not honest. Still—“You probably shouldn’t be.”
Lumine moves closer to him. She shakes her head. “I am,” she says, and he’s acutely aware that she can see, this close. The spots where a knife scraped skin, the many almosts that wouldn’t have been almosts for anyone else.
Childe is good at what he does. But he is human, too.
Her palms are warm pressed against his chest. “But I am,” she says. “That’s what Paimon was talking about, before. I—apparently I, um, ramble a lot when I get drunk?”
“You do?” Childe asks. He can imagine it. Lumine with her cheeks flushed from the alcohol, a worried Paimon trying her best to keep her from falling. Cute, he thinks, again. He has to look down at her to meet her eyes. It’s hard to swallow all of a sudden, too caught in the promise of her smile.
Lumine nods. “About you, specifically.”
“Me? And here I was, fully under the impression that you didn’t like me that much.”
She hums. “Yeah, I thought so too at first,” she says, shrugging, “But I guess I do. Like you, I mean.” The easy confidence falters, for just a bit, and it feels like a ray of light breaking through the clouds. If he was poetically inclined at all, he might stop to think about why Lumine reminds him so much of sunlight. But she’s close, and warm, and smiling up at him, and he really, really wants to kiss her.
So he does.
Like nothing in his life ever has been, it’s easy. Cupping her chin, leaning down, watching Lumine’s eyes flutter shut as her arms wrap around his neck—it’s all so, so easy.
She tastes like sunlight, too, and she’s smiling when they pull apart.
Childe doesn’t know a lot about this kind of happiness, light and bubbly, delicate like butterfly wings, and simply—given instead of earned (because the heavens know he didn’t do anything to earn her), but he likes it.
“You haven’t slapped me,” he says, throwing Lumine an exaggerated wink, “so I think this counts as an auspicious beginning to our relationship.”
Lumine—predictably—hits him. Then, “You should take your shirt off more often,” she says solemnly.
Childe smiles. Neither of them has a single clue what the future holds, nor where it will lead them, but for now, he decides that sounds like an excellent short-term plan.
(And if, later, Paimon will float in unannounced and yelp at the sight she finds—well. At least the Inn has plenty of other rooms.)