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Kaeya closes the door behind them with a soft click, doesn’t bother locking it. Not because he’s worried about anything happening, but because he doesn’t care what could. At this point the guards are more than a little suspicious, but Kaeya’s used to that and he can’t care less about how they talk. Like everything else, talk means nothing without a real threat. If they find a dead body, it won’t be his, that’s for certain. He takes up residence in his favorite chair and Tartaglia—called “Childe” only to people that don’t know better—sits on the bed, looking like he might rest his shoes on the goddamn pillow if he isn’t stopped. So Kaeya clicks his tongue twice, and then says, “You shouldn’t be sitting there.”
“Where should I sit then?” Tartaglia asks, pulling off his gloves like this is his room and his headquarters. “You’re in the only seat.” He smiles, politely, but without any heart in it. Kaeya knows the kind. “And aren’t I your guest, anyway?”
Guest is stretching it. Kaeya is an over-glorified babysitter, but he has accepted it. Jean is too busy and Lisa is too dangerous, and no one else is as suited for Fatui dealings than he is. And oddly, he has grown fond of Tartaglia. Nothing serves to deepen a bond with a man like refraining from killing him, every day, for a month. There’s too much to lose, at any rate, and it’s not like the Fatui Harbinger has been doing anything terribly wrong other than ruining Amber’s scout missions and causing general unease among the people.
“Well. I suppose you are,” Kaeya concedes, getting up from his comfy chair slowly.
“Join me on the bed. That would make us even.” There’s almost a come-hither look in his eyes now as he scoots over, even though there’s ample room for Kaeya on the queen-sized mattress.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were flirting.” It pours out from his mouth like wine from a bottle. He goes to sit down anyway, almost profoundly aware of how the mattress gives under the weight of the two of them.
Tartaglia must be under a mood, gripped by something that could be mistaken for sentimentality. He reaches for Kaeya, and there’s a sort of thoughtfulness in the way he touches the dip of Kaeya’s inner arm, opposite the elbow, tracing some mindless pattern on the skin.
Kaeya would think nothing of it usually, but when the gloves are off, when Tartaglia looks for once like he isn’t trying to get himself killed, it gets dangerously close to falling over the edge they’ve been dancing on. Tartaglia’s hands should not be soft, but they are. Kaeya stares at them the way a cat stares at a wriggling mouse. The more he looks, the more the display of affection seems like a display of power, a killer whale playing with its prey.
“Fifty Mora for your thoughts,” Kaeya says.
Tartaglia looks up. “Only fifty?”
“Do you really think you deserve more?”
Tartaglia laughs. It’s not a real laugh. “Maybe not.” He reaches to Kaeya’s upper arms, touch heavy and warm. “I was thinking I could kill you.”
It always comes to this. Their proximity is only vulnerability, never intimacy, but there’s something to be said for the flush in Tartaglia’s face. It makes his freckles stand out. “I suppose I owe you fifty Mora,” Kaeya drawls, searching his expression for anything, some weakness to hold onto, though he knows there will be nothing.
“Keep it.”
“Very well, then.” Kaeya considers that streak of blond. There is still much they do not know about each other, much they will never know about each other. It’s all too much edge to be sentimentality, but something is tugging at the back of his mind. “I don’t think you could, anyway. Kill me, that is.”
Tartaglia shakes his head, almost petulant, grips Kaeya by the arms. “You’re a tough one, but I could do it.” Oh, there’s a capacity for it. Kaeya considers this. It’d be a messy kill, not clean the way any hunter would take the life of an animal. The best only take one shot, in and out the vitals before the creature even knows there’s danger. Tartaglia’s kills would have enough blood to paint this room red. And a kill would never happen, not to Kaeya, but the potential is there, latent, bound up in the lean body before him. Kaeya has seen it before, experienced it before—the moment when it shifts, and every muscle transforms into something lethal.
“Hm. How would you go about it?”
Tartaglia moves his hand to Kaeya’s shoulders, the dip in the side of his neck. For a moment Kaeya thinks Tartaglia might grab him by the throat, but he does not. Only stares at Kaeya with those cool blue eyes even more unknowable than Kaeya’s own. “I think I’d do it with my bare hands. Pressure to the blood vessels like they taught us. Did they teach you that?”
Someone did. Not anyone in the Knights, but someone. “They did not. You Fatui are so brutish.”
Tartaglia shrugs. “Not any more than you Knights of Favonius.”
“No one’s perfect,” Kaeya says like it means something.
There’s a pause, heavy in a way they will both ignore. Tartaglia hums. “I’ll take you there someday so you understand. To Snezhnaya.”
“How hospitable of you.” Kaeya thinks that if it were anyone else, he would close his eye and let it be. As it is, Tartaglia traces his thumb along Kaeya’s pulse, and all Kaeya does is note the action, a bystander in his own position. This touch means nothing to either of them, and even if it did, Kaeya has a knife in his sleeve and a repertoire of self-defense techniques at his disposal. “You’d have to consider an excuse. Political relations? Perhaps I go as an ambassador on Mondstadt’s behalf?”
“Isn’t the cavalry out on an expedition? A poor choice for Mondstadt, to let its only available Cavalry Captain go on a vacation to Snezhnaya.”
“So you were paying attention,” Kaeya says, only half-joking.
“Vulnerability is an important thing to notice,” Tartaglia answers, and Kaeya is sure that’s only a half-joke as well.
“It is, isn’t it,” Kaeya muses. “We’ll have to fabricate something else, then. You’re good at that, aren’t you, Fatuus?”
“Fabrication?” Something that could pass for a smile crosses his face. “I think you might be better.”
It’s just reflex, really. Kaeya couldn’t do it the exact same way if he tried, but the ending matters more than the means: Tartaglia’s back against the bed, Kaeya’s hands on either side of his head, digging into the comforter, and for a split of a split second the Harbinger looks vulnerable, like a deer caught in a noose. And then, with a smile, suddenly he doesn’t anymore.
“I think we could be great friends, Captain,” he says. He has his hand on Kaeya’s chest, on the bare skin of his sternum. Kaeya wonders if he feels how steadily the heart inside is beating, if that makes Tartaglia nervous. He doesn’t seem like the type to get caught up in little things like that. Boneheaded and ruthless.
“Could have been, perhaps, once upon a time.”
“I think we still could be,” Tartaglia insists. “Look, that’s a great cover—” He’d be making grand gestures with his hands if he weren’t restrained right now, if he weren’t so set on complying with it. Other than the hand on Kaeya’s chest, he hasn’t moved. It’s a strange position for both of them. This close, Kaeya can see flecks of gold in his eyes. “—Against all odds, Cavalry Captain Kaeya and the Eleventh Harbinger of the Fatui grow fond of each other. To the point that neither of them wishes to separate.”
It wouldn’t address the lack of arms in Mondstadt, and is thus no better than the first suggestion, but Kaeya acquiesces. “And so Cavalry Captain Kaeya joins Tartaglia, called Childe, on his trek back to Snezhnaya, is that what you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” He doesn’t flinch, says this unblinkingly. Doesn’t even give Kaeya a moment’s pause. “I think it could be a good time.”
“Do you, now?”
“So coy,” Tartaglia says with a laugh. Kaeya ought to get out of this position, and maybe the entire situation while he’s at it, but this time around he doesn’t much want to, and it’s not like Tartaglia is trying to push him off either. “If you like, I could kidnap you instead.”
“I’m not a small man, Tartaglia.” He must be tired, he thinks, to even entertain the thought of going to Snezhnaya, and with a Fatui Harbinger, of all people. But he doesn’t care to shut it down, and it’s almost nice, almost like they’re making conversation, or like they’re sparring. Either way, he’s sure that those are the only times Tartaglia feels like he’s alive—Kaeya understands this much. He at least looks alive now, color in his cheeks, warmth to his skin.
Tartaglia shifts his hand and the movement is so sudden that Kaeya almost ices over, but all the Fatuus does is rest his hand at the edge of Kaeya’s jaw, like he can’t decide whether he wants to snap his neck or kiss him. Kaeya will allow neither, but he lets Tartaglia keep his hand there anyway. Sometimes the illusion is nice. “I’d carry you on my back.”
In a way, it’s charming. Kaeya laughs lightly, saying, “I could stab you in that position, though.”
“I don’t mind,” Tartaglia says. He will not break eye contact, and so neither does Kaeya. His breath is warm on Kaeya’s face and there’s the sweet undertone to it—wine, of course. “Makes for a more interesting encounter, don’t you think?”
“It’s like you want to die.” Kaeya lets the edge creep into his voice now. It won’t even register as a threat.
“As if you’d kill me.”
Kaeya’s sure that he could. But the contraction leaves room for the woulds, or the shoulds. “Such dark turns we’ve taken, Tartaglia,” Kaeya says. He smiles with all his teeth and says in a low voice, “But let’s not talk about such matters.”
For a moment, Tartaglia’s eyes almost look bright, and then they don’t. At this angle, anyone could be fooled into thinking he’s the young man he’ll never be. “Let’s not talk,” Tartaglia agrees softly. He runs his hands through Kaeya’s hair and down his sides like he’s trying to feel for weapons, or just trying to feel. Kaeya allows him this and nothing more.