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“... And this… is my hometown, Morepesok.”
Lumine can sense the big smile on Childe’s face even with his back turned to her, his hand holding hers tightly as he proudly introduces the quaint little town that he grew up in. He always talked big game about this place and how much he wanted to bring her here. He wanted to let her see how beautiful it is, to go and meet his family, to fulfill their promise to Teucer that she'd come to Snezhnaya with his big brother.
And now, they're finally here, walking down the snowy road leading to his house.
The harbinger turns around to face her. “Do you like it so far?” he asks, sounding a little unsure and nervous.
Lumine knows how much hearing that she enjoys Morepesok would mean to him; how much it would make him happy to know that she appreciates this place he calls home. The fact that this place holds so many memories that are dear to Childe already makes it special to Lumine, especially now that she finally gets to see it with her own eyes.
She stares up at him and nods with a wide grin on her lips.
“I love it,” she tells him sincerely, eyes gleaming with joy as she watches Childe’s face light up at her words. “Although, it is a bit colder than I expected.”
The tall ginger laughs at her confession, admiring how the flush of red on her cheeks makes her look even cuter. He tugs her closer to him, pulling her scarf and wool coat tighter to warm her up better.
“That's exactly why I told you to bundle up well,” he says, booping her nose which is slowly turning runny due to the chilly air. Lumine grumbles, pouting grumpily at his I-told-you-so comment.
“Don't worry, we're almost near,” he informs her. He points at a big house in the distance, saying, “see? it's just there” before offering to carry her on his back to make the trip faster.
Tsk. Childe knows she never refuses his offers for piggyback rides. “Do you even need to ask?”
“Nope,” the harbinger chuckles, already crouching down to let her jump on his back. Lumine does so enthusiastically, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck as he secures her legs around his waist. He carefully stands back up, but she still yelps a bit out of habit.
Childe laughs and kisses her cheek once she's adjusted herself to a comfortable position on his back.
She’s right; the winds of Snezhnaya right now feel too harsh and cold, but there’s a certain kind of warmth coming from Lumine’s embrace that makes the breeze feel like nothing to him. A warmth that’s irreplaceable, unmatchable, unparalleled.
He has never felt this kind of warmth, not until Lumine came into his life.
She snuggles closer to him and buries her face into the crook of his neck, making him smile with thoughts of how she fits in him perfectly like a puzzle piece.
“Hold tight, girlie. I’ll go fast.”
A snowy escape
Lumine walks through the door of Childe’s home, heart pounding loudly at the thought of finally meeting his family. He’s just two steps ahead of her, leading the way to the cozy mini-mansion which somehow felt so welcoming to her. He tells her to leave her coat by the doorway, where she finds a rack already filled with different colors and sizes of winter wear.
“You can hang your scarf by the stairs. We’ll get it later,” Childe tells her, the sweet smile never leaving his face. Lumine does as told, leaving the red scarf that he gave her before they boarded the boat to Snezhnaya. He personally knitted it so that it would match the red scarf that he always wore, which made it even more special to her.
She hears fast footsteps approaching them, followed by excited squeals led by one that sounded so familiar –
“Miss Lumine!”
A flash of orange barrels into her, and the next thing she knows, she’s laughing and hugging Teucer hello. “You really came!” the freckled kid happily exclaims.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to be thrown on ice, get my pinkie killed by the cold, or my tongue frozen from the frost,” she says, remembering the words to the Snezhnayan pinky promise that Teucer taught her when he snuck off to Liyue. The youngest of Childe’s siblings grins widely, delighted that she still knew it even if it has been quite a long time since then.
A gloved hand ruffles Teucer’s hair, and both of them look up to see Childe looking just as happy as his brother.
“Hey, Teuc. Maybe you should introduce Lumine to Tonia and Anthon, too?”
At Childe’s words, the traveler looks behind him and spots two younger gingers who share the same blue eyes and freckled cheeks as him and Teucer. They both look at her with curiosity and excitement, as if they also recognized her.
“You’re the almighty Lumine, the honorary knight of Mondstadt, hero of Liyue, and the one who faced the archon of Inazuma?” the boy, Anthon, says, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Seeming to notice that the traveler is taken aback by how Anthon knows all of those, Tonia speaks up and explains.
“Big brother always writes about you in his letters. He keeps talking about how great and strong you are,” she reveals with a teasing smile directed at her brother.
Childe laughs awkwardly and puts his arm around the traveler's shoulder. The tips of his ears are red, flustered by how easily his siblings had snitched on him to Lumine.
"Ha ha, I think my siblings have said too much," he says before stealing her away from the three youngsters. He leads her instead towards the dining room, where his parents and older siblings await them. He introduces Lumine to everyone, and he can see from their faces that they're very pleased to meet her.
Throughout dinner, Lumine laughs and exchanges stories with his family. It's a sight that made Childe’s heart almost melt, just like how it does every time the traveler smiles at him.
She helps clean up the table after, shooing him away when he told her that she didn't need to. He's sure she already earned a spot in his mother's heart, especially when she picked up the big empty pot of borscht and asked how she was able to make such a delicious dish on their way to the kitchen.
Well, this is Lumine he's talking about. It's so easy to love her - he could testify to that.
Once they're done with the cleanup, the ladies huddle together and look at photo albums laid on the counter. Childe tries to squeeze himself in there, but his cheeks immediately turn red when his mother and sisters start showing photos of him as a kid. Some were too embarrassing for him to see again, and he tried covering Lumine’s eyes to prevent her from seeing it, too.
But Lumine, being Lumine, just held his hand to keep it from interfering with the family’s trip down memory lane.
“Here’s him! Back in elementary, when he was still on the ice hockey team,” Childe’s mother says while pointing at his younger self posing in his uniform.
Lumine turns to face him, squishing his cheeks while telling him that he was such an adorable kid.
“You never told me you played sports,” she says, and he tells her that the opportunity never came up. She scrunches her nose playfully and tells him that he should teach her some time. With a smile, he promises he would.
When they climb up to his room that night, she asks him to tell more stories about those days she saw in the photo album. Childe tries his best to recall, even if memories from before he was 14 years old already felt murky in his head.
They snuggle in the twin-sized bed in his room, the blankets keeping both of their naked bodies warm as they share all sorts of kisses. Lumine runs her hand through Childe’s choppy hair, enjoying how soft and fluffy it feels in her hands. Meanwhile, he keeps her close with his arm around her waist, inhaling the sweet scent of raspberries and spearmint that seemed too natural on her.
“Your family’s really nice,” Lumine tells him sleepily, pushing her face to his chest and letting her hand fall from his hair to his neck. Her fingers draw random figures on his skin, and it feels so soothing that it makes Childe hum softly.
“They think you’re really nice, too,” he tells her. “They like you a lot.”
The traveler smiles, pressing her lips to his chest for a sweet peck to express her glee.
“They keep on asking me to marry you,” Childe continues to say, his voice hushed in a soft whisper. “I said I would, and we’ll give them eleven grandchildren when we do.”
Lumine laughs, giving him a light, playful slap on his stomach. “Do you know how hard childbirth is? Eleven is too many. And I doubt you can think of names for all of them.”
Childe lifts her chin so that she’s looking at him, his eyebrow raised in challenge. “I can, too! Want me to list my ideas now?”
The traveler rolls her eyes, which gets Childe’s competitive spirit running. “Anastasia, Alisa, Alyona, Luda, Aleksandr, Andrei, Artem, Luka –”
He gets cut off by Lumine’s lips on his, shutting him up effectively. “Okay, okay, I get it,” she tells him in defeat, giving rise to a smug smirk on Childe’s face.
“Believe it or not, I’ve got our future planned out,” he says, cerulean blue eyes holding an ocean of promises as he kisses the top of her head and intertwines their fingers together.
Closing her eyes while enjoying the safety of his embrace, Lumine tells him that she believes it with all her heart.
The sinking feeling
If Lumine’s biggest nightmares are being unable to reunite with her brother and falling through an endless darkness, her biggest fear when she’s fully awake is feeling lonely.
Ever since she woke up from the Unknown God separating her from her brother, thinking about not having anyone by her side made her feel sick to the core. That’s why she brought Paimon along without thinking twice – at least, with the pixie around, she doesn’t feel alone. Perhaps that’s also why she feels much more comfortable when her friends join her in certain commissions and adventures, like that time Xinyan and Childe joined her in exploring the Mystic Onmyou Chamber.
Childe knows this, too. He knows that she hates feeling like there’s no one by her side. He knows that she hates feeling like she’s fighting her battles alone.
When a hesitant Paimon asked to stay behind in Liyue instead of joining Lumine in finally heading to Snezhnaya, Childe volunteered to accompany her on the journey instead.
The first week they spent in Morepesok was beautiful; magical, even. Snezhnaya may have been colder than she expected, but he never was. Not until they go to the Zapolyarny Palace, and the truth that she tries to ignore about their relationship slaps her in the face.
Childe isn’t just her Childe; he’s also the Fatui’s Tartaglia.
She feels his hand let go of hers when the doors to the palace open, and he doesn’t even glance back once to check on her. She tries not to let it get into her head, but the way Childe suddenly turned cold – she doesn’t know what to think about it. He’s in his work mode, she convinces herself.
All the harbingers turn to look at Lumine when they enter the courtroom, with her trailing a few steps behind Childe who almost seemed like he’s a mere stranger guiding her to where the cryo archon is.
The air shifts for the worse when the Tsaritsa enters the room, her eyes locked in an icy glare as she looks at Lumine. Of course, she thinks. She saw this coming.
After all, she often ends up getting in the way of the harbingers whenever they pursue the gnosis of archons from other nations. Heck, she beats up Fatui agents for breakfast. Of course, the Tsaritsa wouldn’t like her.
That’s what Childe is supposedly for. But he’s just silent, watching from a distance even when Lumine’s sword already materialized in her hand. She’s glaring back at the Tsaritsa, her mind running through every single horrendous thing that her harbingers have done in her name.
The Fatui. Venti, Teppei, the people of Liyue and Inazuma, the children that Dottore experimented on – they’ve hurt so many people. A lot have died in their hands, and neither the Tsaritsa nor any of the harbingers show remorse. Not even now, when she’s already standing in front of them and listing their crimes.
It disgusts Lumine. And it disgusts her even more than they’re all looking at her as if she’s weak for having a conscience; as if she’s weak for having empathy for the people.
Necessary sacrifices, the Tsaritsa repeats La Signora’s words in Inazuma. That’s all they view those people as. Just building blocks to achieving the Tsaritsa’s “noble” and “pure” dream.
The hatred that she feels running through her veins now is the same kind of boiling anger she got back then whenever she saw La Signora. Just like the eighth harbinger, they all looked at her as if they weren’t taking her seriously.
And Childe, who promised to always have her back, isn’t even looking at her.
The first crack in the glass
Lumine has been so quiet on their way back from the Zapolyarny Palace, and it was starting to get into Childe’s nerves. After dinner, he asks his family to leave him and Lumine to clean up together, in hopes that they could talk in private.
“You’re mad at me,” he points out, breaking the silence once he’s sure that it’s only the two of them. All he hears is the sound of running water from the faucet at first, angry splashes coming from the plate that Lumine is washing.
“I’m not mad at you. Who said I was mad at you?” she grumbles without looking at him.
Yeah, right, he says in his head while rolling his eyes. How were they going to talk properly if she’s doing this?
“Well, you’re acting like you're mad at me. It’s ridiculous,” he blurts out, his mouth running before his mind could even filter his words.
Lumine scoffs and mockingly parrots the way he said “ridiculous”. She turns off the faucet a bit too forcefully, the dishes clinking as she starts to stack them.
“What’s ridiculous is that you acted like a complete stranger when we were around the harbingers – when we were around the Tsaritsa.”
Childe gives her an odd look. “What the hell are you talking about?”
That was it. He doesn’t even know what he did wrong; he doesn’t even know what he did that hurt her. He doesn’t even know that at that moment, she felt like she was meaningless to him – like she wasn’t worth it enough for him to stand up to his beloved archon and the other harbingers.
“I’m talking about how you didn’t even back me up!”
“But you don’t even need any backup,” Childe says as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. Lumine’s jaw clenches, and with better judgment, she puts down the dishes... or else she’ll end up breaking them.
“Oh, so that’s why you just watched as they treated me like I was just a pathetic little girl holding an unreasonable grudge!”
“That’s bullshit –”
“You always said you have my back, but not one word came out of your mouth when I was standing in front of your archon! You always said you didn’t agree with the other harbingers’ actions, but when I was bringing them up, what did I get from you? You didn’t even look at me!”
"Well, what did you want me to do?" Childe exclaims, shaking his head as he approaches her. He dumps a couple of dishes to the sink, adding more plates to her pile. “I brought you there because I thought you’d have a decent conversation with the Tsaritsa about your brother or the Unknown God, but you started trauma dumping on –”
“Trauma dumping?” Lumine says, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists. Childe knows how fucked up the other harbingers’ actions are, and he knows how affected she is by the ones she had witnessed. He listened to her talk about the people who got hurt and died and he even comforted her – and now he’s saying… this.
Gods, it fucking hurts.
“That’s… I didn't mean that,” Childe sighs in frustration and runs his hand down his face exasperatedly. “Holy shit. This is so fucking unfair.”
Lumine grumbles under her breath and lets the water run in the sink again, while Ajax paces back and forth and sneaks glances at her. Face turning red, he lets his anger take over his rationality, not minding what words come out of his mouth anymore.
“How can you be attacking me for something so ridiculous? It's so fucking selfish,” he says.
Lumine turns around and narrows her eyes at him, her nostrils flaring at his words. Selfish. She, the traveler who has done nothing but help other people, think about other people, and put other people before her. She is being called selfish by the man she loves, the man who's supposed to know her – to understand her – the most.
“Oh, so I’m selfish now?”
Gods, the fucking irony of it all.
“Yes! Absolutely! You keep on making this all about yourself and how you feel about the Fatui! You’re blowing so much shit out of proportion,” Childe says, raising his voice which makes Lumine angrier. “I took you there like you wanted to – what do you fucking want from me?”
“What do I fucking want from you?” she rages, wringing her hands together because she’s feeling the urge to throw the dirty plates at him.
“I want you to stick to your words! You agreed with me when we were talking about how wrong the harbingers’ actions are, but why were you so fucking silent the entire time? Why did it feel like you were taking their side?”
It becomes quiet in the kitchen, with both of them just looking at each other, too mad to say a word.
Lumine isn’t the type to cry when she’s mad, but perhaps, she and Childe have reached the point of a relationship where they don’t mind being vulnerable around each other anymore. Perhaps they’ve reached the point where it’s almost basic instinct for them to express themselves in the rawest, sincerest way possible when they’re together... because they trust each other enough to.
So maybe that’s why she lets herself crumble in front of him. Her eyes hold a mix of pain, anger, disappointment, and more emotions she can’t even explain, and they were staring right at him.
The harbinger groans, feeling guilt rush into him as he looks at Lumine’s crestfallen face. “Don’t look at me like that. That’s so fucked up.”
So she doesn’t. Lumine turns around and directs her attention to the pile of dishes in the sink. From behind her, Childe shakes his head and plants his hands on his hips. He glares at her back, the cabinets, the sink, the floor, the plates – he glares at anything his eyes land on.
Then he hears her sniffle, and it feels like a bucket of ice-cold water is thrown over his head.
“Hey. Hey. Hey,” he says, walking towards her. He wraps his arms around her, hugging her from behind while she continues to sniffle. Lumine tries to wriggle out of his hold, but Childe uses up all his strength to keep her within his arms. “Come on, come on. I don’t wanna fight. I don’t wanna fight.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs into her hair. He does his best to hold her steady, all while Lumine tries to bury her head in her hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t back you up.”
He kisses her head repeatedly, and he finally feels her hand wrap around his wrist. Her touch is featherlight, as if mirroring how tired she is from the fight. “Come on, I’m sorry.”
“You promised me that you’d always be there for me,” hic. Lumine tries to control the shakiness from her voice, but it’s so hard. “On our way here from Liyue, you said – you said that no matter what, you’d have my back. You said that I shouldn’t worry because you’re on my side. But I felt so alone there… like I had no one...”
Childe nods, remembering everything that he told her when they were on the boat to Snezhnaya. “I know, I’m sorry. I should have said something at the palace, and I shouldn’t have said all those words to you now.”
He frees her from his hold once she has calmed down. Gently, he turns her around to face him, her back pressed against the sink. “Lumine, look at me.”
The traveler shakes her head, tears still falling from her eyes. “No, I look stupid,” she murmurs.
Childe pries her hands away from her face and cups her cheeks, wiping away her tears with the pad of his thumb. “No, you don’t. I’m sorry.”
His voice is softer, the cold and angry Childe now gone. He presses his lips to her forehead, and then the side of her face, and then the tip of her nose, and then her cheeks, and then her lips.
“I’m sorry.”
He pulls her into a hug, and Lumine lets herself fall into his arms. He rubs her back soothingly while her face is pressed against his chest, their heartbeats falling into sync once again as they silently make amends.
But little did they both know that this is only the first crack in the glass – the start of a gaping hole that can tear anything apart; the beginning of a great gap in something so fragile.
After all, they were from opposing sides with opposing views. Lumine never agreed with nor liked what the Fatui does, and Childe never knew if he could throw away being Tartaglia or not.
The magical moments
It was midnight, and Lumine couldn’t sleep. Her mind is plagued with so many thoughts, and the nightmares she keeps on getting weren’t helping her case at all. Head buried in her hands as she tries to find solace in the quiet kitchen of Childe’s home, she barely hears the sound of approaching footsteps from behind her.
“Hey, what are you doing up?” the harbinger’s sleepy voice rings through her ears as he makes his presence known with a kiss on her nape and a hug from the back. Lumine leans against his chest, eyes closed as she tries to lose herself in his warmth.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispers.
“Nightmares again?” Childe asks. Worry lines appear on his forehead when she nods. “Wanna talk about it?”
Lumine sighs, the exhaustion evident in how heavy it was. Her nightmares are getting more frequent, and when she’s awake, a good chunk of her time is spent thinking about them. “Just… sad things, as usual.”
A slight frown etches itself on Childe’s lips. Ever since their fight, Lumine has been less open about her feelings. On normal days, she would’ve elaborated on what’s haunting her, and he would comfort her with hugs and massages, but now… her answers were like this.
It bothers him a lot, but he doesn’t push it. He and Lumine are fine again; they’re happy, they’re together. That’s what matters.
He keeps his arms around her, humming softly while pressing light kisses to the side of her head. A few moments later, an idea enters his mind and he tells Lumine to stand up.
“Why?”
Childe smiles and extends his hand towards her. “Dance with me.”
The traveler looks at him as if he suggested the silliest thing in the world, but she still slides her hand into his. He pulls her up from her seat on the kitchen counter and puts her hands on his shoulders. His own hands slide down to her waist, his chin resting on top of her head.
“There’s no music,” Lumine points out while he’s swaying their bodies together in silence.
“Just pretend that there is,” he says, taking a step back to twirl her around. Lumine stares at him, the ghost of a smile finally appearing on her lips. He gives her an encouraging nod, and she finally chuckles and twirls.
“This is silly,” she says with a shake of her head while returning to the safety of his arms.
Childe tucks a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear, admiring the way the refrigerator lights illuminate her features in the dark of the night. She’s wearing his plaid shirt – that one she always teased him for because it didn’t look like “his” style. It was like the good old times, and it was beautiful.
He kisses the top of her head. “But it made you smile.”
It was a moment he wanted to remember forever.
The breaking point
Lumine’s sword drops to the thick blanket of snow below her, the blood from it staining the pristine white with unerasable red.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Childe shouts at her angrily, shaking her shoulders as she stares at him wordlessly. “I told you not to intervene!”
She looks up at him in disdain, her lips curling into a snarl. “How could I not? Look around you, they’re hurting innocent people!"
“There’s a reason –”
“What?” Lumine yells, pushing his hands away from her and shoving him backward. “The Tsaritsa’s noble and pure dream? That very noble and pure dream involves hurting countless innocent people over and over again? Ajax, wake the fuck up!”
The harbinger shakes his head. “You don’t understand!”
“What do I not understand? That the end justifies the means? That the road to hell is paved with good intentions?” Lumine says. “Because I’m glad I don’t! It’s fucking bullshit!”
They say that people who go from being enemies to lovers build strong relationships because they’ve already seen and known each other’s worst. But nobody ever talks about how the fallout would hurt like a bitch – nobody ever talks about how much it would hurt to go from hating someone to loving them with your whole heart, only for it to circle back to the start.
Childe knew Lumine’s weak points, and she knew his. He knew how to hurt her and make her feel like shit, and she knew how to do the same.
“If destroying everything meant reuniting with your brother, wouldn’t you do the same?”
“If it was your family and me in these people’s places, would you still look the other way?”
A heavy silence falls between them, both of their questions maiming each other too deeply like they meant it to. They dug up each other’s fears, the ones they confessed to each other out of pure trust that they wouldn’t use it as daggers to strike each other’s hearts.
But that’s exactly what they just did.
“I can’t be with someone who tolerates this shit,” Lumine says, her words strong and clear and decisive.
“Then don’t,” Childe replies, brimming with hostility. “This is my job. You know that I’m a harbinger, you know what I do, you know what I follow.”
And that was the biggest slap in the face that he can give her. He’s right; she gave him her heart despite knowing that they walk a fragile line all this time. It was probably foolish of her to think that it’d never break.
“So you’d rather throw me away than your job? A job that you can’t even tell your own siblings?”
The harbinger doesn’t answer. But his silence and the look on his face – they were enough to let Lumine know what he’d say. He wouldn’t choose her over the Fatui; he wouldn’t choose her over his ambition; he wouldn’t choose her over his beliefs.
She takes a long inhale and exhale to fight back her tears, the light in her eyes slowly fading as she tries so hard not to fall apart inside.
All she feels is shame – it’s a shame that the man she loves has made his choice, and the choice isn’t her. It’s a shame that this isn’t the first time they’ve fought about his part in the Fatui, and now they’ve finally reached their breaking point. It’s a shame that everything beautiful they built together had crumbled just like this.
It’s a shame that there’s nothing else she can do.
She feels the cold wind of Snezhnaya in her hair, and it leaves nasty frostbites on her skin as it comes and goes. She always loved winters, but maybe this one was too harsh for her.
She swallows the lump forming in her throat, the words she never wished to say finally leaving her lips.
“Then I guess this is goodbye.”
The reeling
“Lumine, you should eat. Please, even little bites will do.”
Without lifting her head from her pillow, the traveler looks at Paimon and says that she isn't in the mood to eat. Her tear-stained cheeks and puffy eyes make it obvious that she's been crying again, and there's only one reason why.
The pixie's shoulders slump. There were only two instances that made her witness Lumine cry: the first was when she finally found her twin only for him to reveal that he's the Abyss Order's leader and disappear again.
The second is this. Both Lumine and Childe's Shiki Koshou sent an SOS to Shiki Taishou, informing the domain overseer that the two seemed to have a nasty fight. “It looked like a big breakup,” if Paimon were to quote the replica. Shiki Taishou relayed this to Xinyan through her Shiki Koshou, and the rockstar immediately went searching for Paimon in Liyue.
Paimon didn't really want to go to Snezhnaya, which is why she initially asked to be left behind. But Lumine needed her now, so she went running – or to be more accurate, flying.
The traveler is one of the strongest people she has ever known, and seeing her look so broken just doesn't feel right. She’s like a crumpled-up piece of paper lying in her bed, too sad to eat and too drowning in her tears to breathe.
“That bastard better not show his face to Paimon because Paimon will kill him.”
Lumine only sighs sadly. She feels too empty to respond to her friend's threat to her now-ex-lover; too empty to find a way to dull the searing pain in her chest.
Maybe they got lost in translation. Maybe asking him to pick between her and the Fatui was a mistake.
“Maybe I asked for too much,” she murmurs while staring into empty space. The scene keeps on replaying in her head, and thoughts about Childe keep on double-crossing her mind.
She remembers everything all too well, and it feels like a new hell every fucking time.
“Don't say that,” Paimon snaps. “Don’t let him make you feel like you’re not good enough. Because you are, and Childe is an idiot for letting you go.”
Despite Paimon’s comforting words, Lumine still cries herself to sleep that night. And the night after. And the other night after that. She cries herself to sleep while thinking of how Childe would’ve held her close if he was with her – if he still felt for her the way he used to. She cries and cries and cries until she forgets about him long enough to forget why she even needed to.
The remembering
When Childe came home with bloodshot eyes and reeking of fire-water without Lumine by his side, his family already knew that he had fucked up.
Three days. He didn’t come home for three days, and it would’ve probably taken longer if his father didn’t hear about his son wreaking drunken havoc in the next town. Childe’s brothers had to clean up his mess and drag his wasted ass back home, where everyone looked at him with both pity and disappointment.
His family loved Lumine. His younger siblings thought that she’s lovely, his older siblings liked that she kept him in check, his mother was happy that he looked so happy when he’s with her, and his father was pleased to know that Ajax was capable of loving someone.
But now, she’s gone and he’s a goddamn mess. Losing her didn’t just mean losing the person he loves – losing her also meant he lost his best friend, his sparring partner, the only person he has ever honestly confided in, the only person who understands what it’s like to feel swallowed by darkness, the only person who could see both the best and worst in him yet still stay by his side.
Losing her meant he lost the only person who made him feel at home, no matter where in Teyvat’s seven nations he is.
Losing her meant he lost the one real thing he’s ever known. And it was his fault – he took her for granted, he thought that she’d keep on accepting things because she loved him.
It was another everlasting winter in Snezhnaya. Childe digs through his drawer in search of his gloves and scarf when his hand lands on a familiar soft fabric. He pulls it out and there comes tumbling a pair of matching red scarves.
One is his, and the other is Lumine’s... was Lumine’s.
She left it at his home when she stayed here. When he last saw her. When everything fell apart. He has mailed her back all her things, too ashamed to personally bring them to her… except for this one.
The floodgate of memories opens in his mind, and there he finds himself again, remembering their little dates across Teyvat, their playful banters on the way to Liuli Pavilion, their weekly spars at the Golden House, and their stolen kisses in her teapot.
There he is again, remembering the beautiful times when she loved him so, and feeling his heart shatter when he thinks that she probably doesn’t anymore. He hurt her too much, and he’ll only end up continuing to hurt her because of who he is.
He clutches her red scarf tighter, holding on to it like the way he should’ve held her. It still smells like her – like raspberries and spearmint and hope and innocence.
Closing his eyes, he whispers her name like a sacred prayer, knowing that he wouldn’t ever be able to get rid of his regret the same way he couldn’t get rid of the only remaining piece of her that is with him.
The time that passed
Time doesn’t fly and wounds don’t heal easily, but Lumine does her best to move forward. Taking commissions after commissions and helping other people let her take her mind off the fallout, and Aether – she also got Aether back. She may not have been able to return to her old self, but she’s doing better now.
Her and Aether’s time in Teyvat is over. They’ve agreed to go back to hopping between worlds – after all, there’s nothing tying Lumine back to Teyvat anymore except for the friends she made. And although it made them sad to learn that she’s leaving, they all agreed that it was perhaps for the best.
Childe heard from Shiki Koshou that there will be a farewell party for Lumine in Liyue. His feet drag him to Wanmin Restaurant before he could even think twice, wanting to see Lumine again – especially if this will be the last time.
He wanted to run to her the moment he spotted her blonde hair in the crowd, but he settles with only watching from the distance. He doesn’t know if seeing him again would hurt her – she looks so happy now, especially now that she finally found her brother. He couldn’t… he couldn’t take that happiness away from her.
Even if he’s still stuck on the days they were still together.
Perhaps never forgetting her is the consequence of not choosing her, a decision that only a fool like him would have made.
He looks at the red scarf in his hand, a sad smile crossing his face as he hears her sweet laughter from the distance. He feels the winds of Liyue in his hair, and a single tear falls to his cheek as he thinks about how much he missed hearing that melodious sound.
With one last look at the girl he loved and lost, he spins on his heel and walks away – the memories of her haunting him all too well.