Chapter Text
It hits her suddenly, like a cart into a boulder, the fact that she's beginning to forget his face.
Her first thought is panic - she can't forget him, all that she has of him are her memories, the picture of him in her mind's eye, fighting side by side...
(Certainly not the look of anguish on his face as he is dragged away by the Unknown Goddess to somewhere she cannot follow.)
Her second thought is confusion - because, how can she forget his face, when they have nearly the same one? Aside from different eyebrows, Aether's scattered freckles, Lumine's permanently furrowed brow, they're the same. They're twins - of course they're the same! How on earth could she forget him?
That's when the third thought hits her:
She's beginning to forget herself too.
It's by candlelight that she stands on her tiptoes, trying to get a better look into the mirror, but all of her features seem... Distorted, somehow. She doesn't look like herself.
She doesn't feel like herself either.
Unrecognisable by face and heart alike, Lumine feels anxiety begin to bubble up in her chest, nausea in her throat. In those 500 years that she slept, she lost herself. Memories of prior worlds have become fuzzy, and it's painful, and it's frustrating to remember.
She ghosts her fingers along her features, shivering when they make contact with her cheekbones, the slope of her nose.
She's immortal, yes, but in this moment, she's never felt more painfully human. Teyvat has given her so much - friends that she never thought she would make, a family found of misfits and miscreants, but oh, how she wishes she could share it with him. Teyvat's language now seems more native to her than her mother tongue, and God, that terrifies her.
It seems like only months ago that Paimon sat with a stick, drawing letters in the wet sand and making Lumine try to pronounce them over and over. (She still had trouble with the 'oo' sounds.)
The rate at which she'd been forgetting her native is unnatural to her, she's well aware of that - her mind had deteriorated during her slumber, like a rusted padlock able to be kicked away, broken open by brute force. With no one to practice the language with, no one to understand her, no one to correct her, she started to lose it - just another piece of herself that she'd left behind.
Sometimes you survive by forgetting. But Lumine just wishes she'd been given a choice in the matter.
With one last solemn glance at her unfamiliar reflection, one last desperate attempt to remember a decomposing memory, Lumine sighs, and blows out the candle, casting the room into darkness.