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But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.
- Circe, Madeline Miller
“I'm returning to Snezhnaya in two days.”
Zhongli pauses. Inhale, icicles scrape his lungs. Exhale, a breath a god does not need. “That is soon.” The Liyuen sunset drapes Childe in liquid gold. The timing must be deliberate.
Childe does not look at him. “My apartment is back on the market.”
Childe’s apartment, situated a ways from the harbour. The furniture came with the apartment. His cupboards were lacquered, inlaid with mother of pearl. A kitchen Childe used regularly for his meals, counter polished to perfection. The chairs were made of rosewood, increasingly rare on the market due to high demand. Childe added cushions to them, complaining of their hardness, utterly disrespectful of tradition. Zhongli had said nothing.
Zhongli would endure, and Zhongli would survive. Him, and the nauseating breathlessness of his warm body, breath close enough to taste. Zhongli’s mouth, chained shut with brittle despair. An unyielding body of stone. Zhongli must crack himself open to take the last step closer.
“Will you come see me off?”
Zhongli froze, his pulse a frozen wasteland in his ears, the unravelling of grief like a silk cheongsam. For you, Zhongli thinks, but it’s not enough. Of course, Zhongli thinks. Anything.
“I will be there.” Childe’s mouth is pressed flat into a thin line. He edges closer, flesh against rock. The average mortal temperature is thirty-seven degrees and Childe’s body sears. Zhongli scalds himself on him, and does not move away. “I would survive you,” Zhongli admits. It’s a fact. It's a love confession.
Childe smiles. It’s glacial, and phantom cold singes Zhongli’s fingers. He means it. “You survive us all.”
Zhongli exhales a universe. “You, in particular.”
“You’re such an old man,” Childe laughs. “Most people just say I love you, you know.” He tugs Zhongli closer. Zhongli goes. He cannot deny Childe anything, not when his eyes are frostbitten bare trees and his body is a knife warmed by the stove. A weapon curls his delicate mortal fingers into a god’s body, and Zhongli lets him.
A gnosis and a gaping wound in Zhongli’s chest, carved out in the shape of a man. Humanity, its malleability and its unyielding fragments. “I love you,” Zhongli admits, his heart creaking, a dilapidated house settling to soil, to bone.
Childe’s lips still taste like salt, like tears. “I know.” Old love is sawdust, and a breastbone-tucked dream.