Chapter Text
The night was not young. And the teapot was mostly quiet at this point in the night, but it was certainly not empty either.
People were sprawled out across the teapot like stray cats napping. Energy devoid party goers could be found sleeping soundly in the grass of the garden, crammed into the few beds, taking refuge on the couches or even just passed out cold on the floors of the mansion. The few that were awake had not made it known, as the estate had generally fallen into silence.
One of the few that were awake was Keqing, distinguished Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing, who was currently laying on her side on the front steps.
She drank too much.
The stone steps were not in the slightest comfortable, but she couldn’t find it in her to get up. She’d spent the last bit of the night stumbling and had now fallen into the submission of sleeping on the ground fully clothed. Her future aching joints were an issue for tomorrow.
“Keqing.” A voice calls simply behind her.
The named girl responds with an unenthused groan.
In the front doorway behind her stands the host of the party, the hero of Mondstadt and Liyue alike, who looks down at her with a suppressed grin. To see the ever disciplined Yuheng fully asleep on the stoop of his home was an admittedly pretty funny sight.
He takes a few cautious steps toward her, but she’s so deep in the clutches of alcohol and fatigue that she doesn’t notice. “You can’t sleep here all night, Keqing.” As he approaches his voice drops into more of a murmur, to not disturb her terribly. He crouches beside her, and she can faintly sense a shadow pass over her but still makes no attempt to move. “If you do, you’re gonna be sore in the morning.”
“Mmno...Iwon’t.” she mumbles grumpily, her voice a little muffled where her cheek squishes against the stone.
“Yes, you will.” He returns, his hands slowly reaching for her to ease her onto her back. “And then you’ll complain about it and ask why I didn’t tell you to go to bed.”
Keqing moves without protest at the touch, her head lolling to one side as he pushes her onto her back. She opens an eye to sleepily look up at the boy, who now looks at her with the most smug grin. She scowls at him in return. It’s not that he's mocking her, it’s that he's right.
“...I don’t wanna move.” Is all she can think to respond.
The smug look doesn’t cease, and it’s a little reminiscent of his little floating friend. For a moment, Keqing wonders if it was him that taught Paimon to be so smug, or if it was her rubbing off on him. Perhaps they were both always like that, and they were just a perfect self-satisfied duo made in Hell.
“I can move you.”
She considers it for a moment but stays silent. It would be nice to not sleep on a rock.
Without waiting for an answer Aether’s arms gently move under her, and as a silent surrender Keqing sits up enough for him to hook his arms around her. He glances back down to her face to see her eyes elsewhere, stubbornly denying defeat.
Without another word, he hooks one arm under her legs and the other behind her back, and with ease he lifts her off the ground like a knight lifting a princess. She would have thought that maybe it would have taken him a moment to readjust, but in a single motion he sweeps her up in his arms and is back on his feet. His strength frustrates her. Her hair falls in flurries over her shoulders and over his forearms, normally she would make an effort to organize the tangled ponytails but in her state she didn’t care much.
“I could move by myself.” She states, just in case he misunderstood the circumstance. “I’m allowing you to do this.” her words are slurred as she grumbles them, and Aether laughs a little at the pout.
“You know you’re too young to drink, Keqing.” he scolds playfully in return, his voice still soft as he turns into the mansion.
She thinks for a moment, as if processing his words slowly. “The legal age of drinking in Liyue is 18.” She says softly, “I’m not a child, like you.” She swings her head back up to return his gaze, finding that his eyes hadn’t left her since he’d lifted her up.
“Could have fooled me.”
She glares again before looking away into the main hall, and the people passed out in every corner of the main hall is quite a sight. The blonde girl who spoke in fanciful tongues is now curled up under a blanket on a couch, her bird perched above the fireplace. The couch across from her holds the wolf boy with poor grammar who is curled as close to the fire as possible. The boy with the goggles was sleeping on the rug in the space between them.
She giggles at the poor boy face down on the carpet, and Aether can’t help but add a small laugh as well. It’s like she’d forgotten she was mad at him just a moment ago, her bitterness melting away into drunken giggles.
The two move past them to the stairs, and Keqing looks curiously up at him again. “Am I not going to the guest room?”
He shakes his head curtly. “The guest room is currently occupied with Lady Ningguang, Ganyu, Captain Beidou and Kaedehara.” His voice is almost a whisper as he begins his ascent up the stairs. “I’m not sure there’s space for you on the beds.”
She thinks to protest for a moment but can’t think of a reason to. She’s not sure she’d enjoy sleeping in a cramped bed with her coworkers anyway.
Aether moves with slow vigilance, mindful of the little creaks whining from the stairs as he steps slowly forward. One particularly loud noise and he could wake the entire entrance hall, and considering he’d spent the last part of the knight wrangling drunken adults into bed he would not be too excited to restart the process. One too drunk Yuheng was enough for him.
“Then where are you taking me?” Keqing finally whispers.
“There are two bedrooms upstairs.”
She’s silent for a second. The two rooms upstairs were the bedrooms of Paimon and Aether - Paimon had excitedly given her a tour of the mansion earlier in the night and so she knew as much. The pixie and the few children invited to the party were taken upstairs much earlier in the night, and so she knew she wasn’t being taken there.
The two make it to the top of the stairs as Keqing finally finds a response. “Are you pulling something on me?”
Aether keeps forward, making his way across the loft to a slightly ajar door. “By putting you to bed?”
“By taking me to bed.”
Aether is silent for a moment before he realises her implications, and she can tell the moment this realization happens because it’s evident on his face. The blank, flustered gaze of the Traveller makes her laugh again, which only makes it worse. He would expect a stern warning against attempting anything from her, but he figures her inebriated state is distracting her from making such a threat.
“You have nothing to worry about when you’re with me.” He begins pushing the door open with his shoulder, and it swings open with ease.
Keqing giggles again. “I wouldn’t expect less from the savior of Liyue.”
They make it into the room which is solely lit by a small lamp sat on a desk in the corner. She doesn’t take note of much else, as when he sets her down onto the bed she immediately melts into it.
“Ohhh, glory to the Geo Archon.” she sighs deeply, and Aether laughs. It wasn’t the fanciest bed in the world, but opposed to her previous spot on the steps and his previous home in the woods, he understood the sentiment.
He withdraws his hands from their place on her, and she peers back up at him as he stands before her, her eyes glazed over with the cloudiness of alcohol. He swats away a feeling of allure as he stands under her gaze, a drunk, bewildered kind of look. Her long hair still falls around her on the bed, in a disorderly state that Aether has never had the privilege of seeing.
Silence reigns for a short moment. He catches himself staring and raises a hand to her. “Sit up.”
Her simple gaze sharpens slightly. “Why?”
“Do you sleep with your hair up like that?”
Keqing almost protests but once again he’s right. “No.” she groans and takes his hand, pulling herself up. Her legs fall off the side of the bed, dangling before him and her fingers begin carefully untangling her hair where her pigtail falls from the side of her head. Aether is hesitant for a moment before sitting down on the opposite side of her. With great caution his hands reach for her hair, and surprisingly she doesn’t protest.
He carefully unravels the twist of her hair and it falls loosely over his gloved knuckles as he works to untie the tendril itself. With careful hands like an alchemist he tugs it free and her hair falls loose over her shoulder. It’s now that Aether realizes he’s never seen her with her hair down, and he comes to this revelation as she turns to face him with her hair falling over her shoulders.
They catch each other's gaze again for a moment and Aether suddenly feels warm. Of course Keqing was beautiful in the way that she was always orderly and put together, everyone knew that, but to see her in a much more disheveled state was a different experience entirely. Her face takes up his whole field of vision and so he can’t help but study it, he’s rarely so close to her like this. Even from afar everyone knew that Keqing was beautiful, right? But not everyone gets to see her at the angle he sits in now, where he’s so close he can see the slightest tug of a dark circle under both of her eyes, he can see the tiniest carve of a dimple on her cheek, and if he glances lower he can see (just for a fleeting moment) the red spot on her inner lip, where she undoubtedly adopted the habit of biting it when stressed. And her hair looked so smooth when it was tangled in his fingers just moments before, the feeling confirmed to Aether that her kind of beauty was entirely effortless, not something carefully crafted. He scolds himself for not cherishing the moment more, but she’s drunk, he would have felt like a creep just admiring her hair - more of a creep than he does right now thinking about it.
He’s staring again. She smiles kindly at him, about to thank him, when he clears his throat and stands up again.
The Honorary Knight of Favonius is turned away from her in a lame attempt to recollect himself. “You can sleep in my bed for tonight, I’m gonna take care of some things before I sleep.” He could sleep on the floor, or perhaps Bennett would enjoy company on the rug. It’s a pretty comfortable rug.
He’s met with silence, to his surprise. It’s awkward for a moment. He turns to look at her again, anticipating a request of some kind, and she’s looking dead at him. Her face is contemplative, almost like she’s trying to read him.
“Is everything...-”
His voice trails off as he looks back to her, the face he was intently studying just a second ago. Could she tell he was doing that? Keqing’s soft gaze, a look that’s somewhat foreign to Aether, makes him melt a little. He could never find the words to tell her, but it wasn’t a secret that there was something intimidatingly beautiful about Keqing. “Aren’t you gonna stay with me?” she finally posits.
Aether is taken aback at the words, a little too stunned to immediately respond. She was just teasing him about taking her up here in the first place, and now she wants... Well, realistically, that question could mean a lot of different things.
“...Do you want me to?” Is all he can manage between the beats of his own heartbeat in his ears.
The response is met with another pause. The air suddenly feels suffocating. She raises a hand to grasp at his forearm, and he doesn’t make a move to avoid her.
She considers a response for a moment before she looks away, pulling him in just a bit closer by his arm as she does so. Bashful is an emotion Aether isn’t used to seeing on her. Her voice is small, and even with her face turned away he can see a warm, red tint on her cheekbone.
“Would you want to?”
He can feel himself reciprocating the blush on her face with one of his own. The air is still stiff.
There is a silence so still that he’s afraid she can hear his heartbeat just like he can. He begins to pull his arm away from her grasp and she lets him go. He had expected her to keep her grip, and honestly he was a little disappointed when he found himself able to pull away with ease. He would have expected a moment like this to be more bold and flirtatious coming from Keqing, but to see her so soft makes him melt.
“Uh, Keqing,” he says, breaking the silence. “You’re drunk.” Normally he would politely put her to bed and tease her about it in the morning, but the thing that was making him a bit more cautious was her newfound shyness. It was so genuine, and it felt so alien to see her in such a vulnerable state. He didn’t want to say anything that would actually hurt her feelings.
“I’m not that drunk.”
“Keqing-”
She looks back up at him and he catches his tongue. The hint of a blush on her cheekbone had spread across her face, and the sight of her blush made Aether a little weak.
“Can I kiss you, Aether?”
The question knocks the wind out of his lungs. Keqing is too drunk for this, and Aether too sober.
“You’re drunk.” he reminds her, though his voice has lost its sturdiness.
“I’m just more confident.”
“No, you’re-”
“I wanted to kiss you earlier. I... I-I’ve wanted to kiss you for a while.” She breathes out, and Aether is surprised at how easily she can look him in the eyes as she says this, because he’s not even speaking and he feels like he’s about to choke. She looks away and Aether thinks she’s done speaking, but then she pushes herself off the bed to stand in front of him, closing the distance he’d put between them. Keqing’s eyes look back into his, curious and drunk but slowly building confidence. “There’s just never been a good time. I’ve always wanted to know if the Hero of Teyvat is a good kisser.”
The mentioned Hero of Teyvat feels weak in the knees at this admission. All he can do is look at the girl in front of him and feel helplessly as warmth creeps farther along his face. They hold each other's gaze for a moment before she moves even closer, her hands moving upward to rest on his chest and Aether feels like he’s loading. He’s still processing the request.
“Keqing. You’re drunk.” he says once more, a bit more sternly this time as his hands raise to seize her wrists. The sternness is a bluff, the way she pouts at him and touches him with her gentle hands and gazes up at him from under her messy hair is overwhelmingly persuasive.
Her face melts once more from it’s soft, vulnerable allure to a kind of deer-in-the-headlights look. “Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not.” His voice is now a careful whisper. “But you’re drunk, Keqing. I’m not going to kiss you.”
He lowers her hands slowly. She looks up at him with the same kind of drunken doe eyed gaze as before as he rapidly thinks of ways to get her to sleep so he doesn’t have to keep rejecting her advances.
“Don’t you want to, though?” The look in her eyes feels like she’s pulling him in.
Gods, Keqing.
If she were sober the two would know she had already won this back and forth, but she’s not sober. Aether finds himself stumbling back to keep distance between them in response to the question. She takes a step forward towards him and he takes another back.
Aether can’t see his own face but he can imagine his expression based on the way Keqing giggles as she takes another step (and he takes another back).
“You’re running away from me.” She notes, the soft innocence that previously overtook her tinting into a slight playfulness.
"You should go to sleep, Keqing.” The two keep at this approach-avoid dance for a few more steps before Aether feels a surface behind him and dumbly stumbles into it with a hollow thunk. Keqing giggles once again, keeping stride toward him. The savior of Liyue’s face was burning, his chest felt tight and it was clear from his face that he felt flustered despite his kept composure, but she thought the view was rather cute.
He watches as one of her hands moves to strip the other of her glove, discarding it on the floor. Her now bare hand complies with the other, tugging the glove from her hand and tossing it in tandem. “IIIIIIf you don’t wanna kiss me,” she’s now standing suffocatingly close to him, and she lifts her hands to hold either side of his face. If her gloved hands lightly dusting his chest earlier made him flustered, his mind was simply short circuiting right now at the feeling of her fingertips resting delicately against his skin. “Then why is your face so red?”
Keqing’s playfully innocent smile bears into him as if looking straight through him. He had shut down the idea, but truthfully it took a bit of restraint to not give in to her. He admired the Yuheng greatly, which anyone in Liyue could see and agree with. She’s bold, intelligent, graceful, and anyone with eyes knows that she’s breathtaking. Even in a giggling, drunken state, she can easily dismantle Aether with just a slightly pleading look. To ask why his face is red is like asking why the sky is blue. It's the natural way of things.
He realizes he’s been silent for too long. Keqing smiles up at his buffering expression, still waiting for a response.
Hands reach up to seize her wrists again where her hands still hold his face. It would be so easy for him to lean down and kiss her with how close she’d made their faces. The space between them is ample but the air is still suffocating and silent as the two just look at each other, waiting for something to happen. She thinks she has him but instead he pulls her hands away from his face, and her expression turns a bit dumbfounded.
His golden eyes glance in a different direction, and Keqing recalls how just a bit ago those same shy eyes were smugly stabbing into her. “You’re drunk.” He says, finally. They’re frozen in place for a moment before Keqing withdraws her hands from Aether’s grasp, and when he looks back at her she’s now looking away. The stiffness of the air before was tense, but now it’s more awkward than anything. She turns away from him to face the bed again, a hand coming up to obscure half of her face bashfully.
“...Is that really it?”
“Yes.” Believe me. He takes a step forward after her, sensing that he may have done something to hurt her feelings.
“...Would you kiss me if I was someone else?” She turns to look at him again, and the look of hurt in her eyes is disabling. She holds his gaze over her shoulder before looking away again. “Would you kiss me if I was Ganyu?”
The question strikes him dumb. What did Ganyu have to do with this? “What?”
“Would you want to kiss me if I was prettier?” Keqing’s voice has reduced from it’s bold, authoritative ring to a shy hum. Aether had never seen her this vulnerable, even in the face of literal death she always says things with her whole chest.
Keqing now felt a lump rise in her throat. She felt dumb for even attempting to kiss Aether, and found it laughable now that he would want to do so in the first place. She felt like a fool. She should exit the teapot and request a carriage to her home in Liyue. This was a stupid idea. She had drank too much in the first place, she never drinks, why did she choose to get wasted tonight? Maybe a part of her wanted the excuse to try and be with Aether, and she now felt stupid for coming to such a revelation after she had been rejected. If she had stopped herself then she wouldn’t feel like this right now.
Keqing is lost in her own thoughts when she feels arms wrap about her waist from behind, a chin following to rest on her shoulder. In her peripheral she sees a sliver of golden hair as a strand tickles her cheek. Keqing submits to the touch and leans back into him, despite the rejection she received just moments ago she was still grateful to the presence of warmth pressing into her.
Aether on the other hand was grateful that her eyes weren’t looking straight through him from this angle.
“Keqing… I’m not going to kiss you because you’re too drunk.” He states for seemingly the hundredth time, and she feels a bitter twist in her chest. “It has nothing to do with how pretty you are. Or if I want to or not.” His grip on her tightens a little and he holds her a bit tighter. “I won’t do something that you… might regret in the morning.” His head tilts so he buries his face into her neck, and the rumble of his voice and breath against her skin gives Keqing goosebumps.
The two stand in this one-sided embrace for a moment, the Yuheng quite content with the presence of warmth pressing against her. Aether inhales, deep yet slow, and he’s met with the faint, fresh scent of glaze lilies. He wonders if Keqing wears perfume, or if this is the remnant of all her time spent in the harbor. The scent is intoxicating. Being so close to her is intoxicating. He congratulates himself silently for not giving in her to pleas, because Archons had it been difficult.
"You should sleep.” The tired party host finally says.
Keqing nods sloppily. It was hard to think she was passed out on the front steps of this home earlier. The simple mention of sleep suddenly reminds her how heavy her eyelids are, and she leans harder into his embrace. “Take me to bed.” she slurs.
He sighs at the request. The bed is a few feet away.
But regardless, he releases her from his grasp to find his previous grip on her, and as he begins to lift her he feels her fall limply into his arms. He’s about to ask if she’s okay, but a glance at her face reveals a blank expression, void of consciousness. Aether takes a few strides to the bed and sets her down gently. Upon further inspection it appears she’s fallen asleep entirely.
Thank the Gods. Aether isn’t sure how much longer he could have held out.