Chapter Text
It was a little while before his world fell apart. He still shared a room with his brother then, inseparable as they were. Many of the knights joked that they even had the same dreams. This was incorrect.
Kaeya, until a fateful night, dreamt of nothing at all. And on that night, he dreamed of a place that held a familiarity in its deformation.
The Abyss.
Kaeya knew what dreams were, and he knew that they often were products of the emotions felt in the daylight, so he tried to weather it as such. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.
It was just a dream, and Kaeya walked down the abyss corridor, steps echoing in the unfamiliar realm. His sight felt foggy, edges blurring with a color he didn’t know of. He felt an itch to take off his eyepatch.
It was just a dream, after all, so why not?
He gently removes it and his vision becomes beyond clear. In fact, it becomes too clear. Has he been here before? These walls are too familiar, like he can place a name on them.
No. It’s just a dream.
Yet he’s beginning to hear a noise coming from one of the many chambers in the corridor. As he walks, it becomes louder, and Kaeya notes that he’s nearing the source.
He finds it inside one of the chambers, divided into three floors, connected by a stairwell. The chamber opens into the first floor, inside which he finds another boy.
Kaeya and his brother have been training with the Knights for a while, but nothing compares to the speed and strength with which the boy, graced with a crown of red hair, vanquishes his opponents. As he finishes his trial, dealing finishing blows to the monsters, the use of water blades as a weapon calls attention to a vision on his waist, which Kaeya eyes enviously. Even his dreams mock him.
When the boy is done, he promptly falls to the floor. Kaeya tries to go up to him, but before he can get there, the redhead crawls to the wall of the area and rests there. Kaeya walks over to where the boy is and sits next to him. He’s not sure why, since the boy isn’t real and neither is the whole place, but he’d like it if someone did the same for him, he reasons.
The boy, in his haze, turns to look at him. Shock battles with the tiredness on his face, which makes Kaeya a little unsettled. It’s supposed to be a dream, right?
“Who are you?”
Yeah. It’s supposed to be a dream.
“I’m Kaeya.”
“I’ve never heard that name before.”
What kind of dream is this?
“What’s your name?”
Kaeya expects it to be a name he knows of, a name of one of his friends, a name of a random passerby in Mondstadt, even the name of the Anemo Archon.
“Ajax.”
It isn’t.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it fits that well. I’ve been thinking of getting a new one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Ajax’s breath is choppy and pained, and Kaeya realizes that he is trying to laugh.
“What?”
“Childe.”
“That’s weird.”
“It’s not about the sound, it’s about…”
“About what?”
“You know, the meaning. I’m not there. I’m not out yet. I’m not there yet.”
“I don’t think that’s too hard.”
“What do you mean?” Ajax sits up, curious.
“Just...wake up.”
A confused tilt of the head.
“Don’t you think I haven’t tried that?”
“What do you mean?”
This is a dream—
“This place is definitely real.”
A panic begins to rain down on Kaeya’s nerves.
“Real? What do you mean, real?”
“This place. The Spiral Abyss.”
“Well, of course it’s real, but we’re not actually here.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve been here for a while. You’re not even the first person I met here.”
“And how did you get here?”
“I fell in.”
Kaeya looks into his eyes as he says this, and the deadness in the deep blue of them overwhelm him. Water—the ocean?—begins to spill into the room, engulfing him, pouring into his mouth, his lungs, his blood—
A breath of night air. Clenched hands on bedsheets. A drenched pillowtop. Kaeya’s eyes open and he finds a sudden fear and familiarity in his waking second.
His breathing calms as his eyes adjust to the darkness of the room around him, but his dream has left him shaken. He doesn’t want to go back to bed, but the day’s training has worn him out, and he ends up asleep within a few minutes anyway.
There is no dream that time, but Kaeya’s sleep is restless and he wakes up tired. The memory of his dream fades under the sunlight of the day, forgotten until the night returns.