Chapter Text
“Come on Xiao! You can do it!” The voice nagged at her memory, familiar to her ears, soft and short-breathed, as if they were smiling or excited. Ah. Where had she heard this voice before? How long had it been?
Both older siblings were frozen still, suddenly quiet even though Ganyu had the water running over dishes from lunch just a moment before and Xiao had been shuffling through the stack of cds and dvds, clucking his tongue at the dust gathered over the tops of the covers. Even the fan sitting in the corner of the room, normally humming in the background as it tried to cool the warmth of summer seemed to have gone quiet.
The camera shook within the tv frame and the screen became wildly out of focus, prompting the voice to wave a hand before the camera. The woman behind the camera cheered as the toddler stumbled into the arms of a man on the other end of the hallway. She turned to them with a little wave. “Zhongli,” she scolded, addressing both the man watching quietly and his counterpart in the video. “Are you crying?” Then she was half laughing as he turned away from the camera, leaving the child on his shoulder to wrinkle his nose at the camera alone.
Both watched in collective, tight silence as their father’s chair scraped dully against the tiled floors of the kitchen, and stood, eyes clouded, as if his mind had suddenly been drawn away from the safety of the house. Then he walked up the stairs and the kitchen’s noises, the water gurgling down the drain, the vibrations of the fan, the sound of the woman chiding their father through the buzzing speakers was all too loud.
Ganyu hurriedly shut off the water, drying her hands on a kitchen towel before snatching up the remote and pausing the people moving about on the screen. The dvd player beside her younger brother whirred into silence. “Xiao,” she said, voice trembling slightly.
“I didn’t know,” he scowled, knuckles flaring white over the cd’s yellowed casing.
Ganyu sighed before turning slightly to stare at the screen where Qiqi was blank-faced, a hand raised to trace the frozen outline of Guizhong’s cheek. “I know. They’re not very well labeled, are they... Let me help you.”
Xiao huffed, waving a handful of cd casings at her as if to emphasize his already tall stack of relabeled cases. “I can do it myself, you know.”
Ganyu smiled in reassurance, purple eyes darkening into something closer to a sea of turmoil rather than their usual calm. Her ears still echoed with the remnants of Guizhong’s voice, her humming in the kitchen as she prepared tea in the mornings, the lullabies she sang to them as they bathed in sunlight lazily and knotted glazed lily and qingxin and violetgrass together the way she’d taught them to. She watched as Qiqi stared at the unmoving television with an expression caught between hope and confusion, at a woman she’d never really known, and Xiao, whose eyes were flickering towards the stairs up which their father had disappeared.“I know. But some things are better to not do alone.”