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foul legacy is of the abyss.
it’s an indisputable truth, evident in the way it contorts every part of the human body— takes all the soft spaces where a person is supposed to fit with another and changes them, irrevocably, into a thing that maims. the crook of it’s neck is no home to another’s face, anymore, unless the intent was to pierce their eye. it’s clawed hands could not interlink with anyone’s without slicing through skin. foul legacy is pure weaponry, designed to survive an endless epoch of battle.
childe is foul legacy.
whether or not he’s in the form hardly matters anymore; those lines had blended into each other interchangeably long ago. childe is not a thing of boundaries, had smashed them all against a rock in some dark forest all those years ago. even when his face is soft, smiling, human— he swears he can feel the weight of the mask. that blazing eye. it hangs around him like miasma, like an aura, and perhaps that’s because it is. childe is stained, disfigured from whatever boy he had been born as.
ajax had been lost in the abyss.
nor had he ever been found, really. not by his family, and not by childe. he still looks sometimes. wanders the lines of nothing within his mind and wonders if he can hear the distressed crying of a little kid. he hasn’t, yet. perhaps that’s for the best— childe can’t tell if he’s looking or hunting, anymore. doesn’t know what the outcome would be if he came face to face with something so vulnerable and so weak and so pitiful within himself.
it likes to think it would kill him. dig the electrified edge of its blade into ajax’s soft sternum, and laugh monstrously at winning this specific conquest of the self. it has always loved to conquer.
he likes to think he would take pity on him, put colourful plasters on scraped knees and brush tangled hair and treat ajax as kindly as he treats teucer. they look alike, in his memory. that’s why they’re named as a pair.
neither is winning out. neither is a dishonest desire. they’re true, as conflicting as they are, they are both the truth at once. that’s really the crux of his existence. childe is a shattered mirror of a presence, hard to look at when pieced together. disorienting. wrong. it’s better if he compartmentalises it all, keeps separate shards for separate people. the only issue is that childe isn’t entirely sure how to, is prone to letting the dye of himself leak where it shouldn’t.
how do you separate the acrylic from the cotton, when the fibres blend so?
he’s always a little wrong. never quite right. smiles until the gums of his teeth are showing, but the endless winter in his eyes makes it more a snarl than anything joyful. slaughters indiscriminately, but raucous laughter follows, bright and sonorous as if he’s doing something as easy as flying a kite. perfect brother, awful son. great company, horrible friend.
even worse lover, he thinks, swallowing back the urge to sink his teeth into the muscle of thoma’s neck. how easily he could kill him, now; how thoma’s face would hardly have time to change from one of confusion before he bled out. childe presses his lips to that precious space instead, smiles against his skin as if something so quaint was enough to sate him. thoma’s pulse is strong against his mouth, callously unguarded.
it’s because i trust you, he had said to childe once, when he’d asked why thoma relaxed around him so freely.
what an awful idea, childe had replied, and they’d laughed it off together— their fingers brushing together on the stone wall they sat on.
childe thinks about it now. thinks about it often, actually. would he trust him still, if he knew half the things he thought? half the things he did? he dreams; wretched, fragmented things. he dreams about thoma finding him doused in someone else’s blood. in one, he kneels next to childe, wipes the viscera from his face and kisses the corner of his mouth. tells him that he’ll run childe a bath, tells him not to worry. childe wants to crack his ribs open and climb in.
in another, he stares at childe with horror etched into every line in his handsome face. he watches that horror morph into fear, watches it ferment into a bone-deep revulsion for everything childe is. he laughs, in this one. advances on thoma with his blade in his hand, goaded by the presence of prey. it always ends with crying. he is never asleep long enough to discern whether or not the tears on thoma’s face are his, or childe’s own.
worse, still— because childe is always worse and never better— he cannot tell which outcome he would prefer.
thoma sleeps as peacefully as he always does. immune to the godforsaken void festering in childe, apparently. he watches his face, from within his arms. counts every beauty mark coaxed out by the inazuman sun, catalogues the way his eyelashes fan across the gentle curve of his cheek. he is beautiful, and childe is so, so ugly.
sometimes he wonders how it doesn’t give him away, standing next to thoma. how it doesn’t expose the rotten sludge crawling through his veins, when thoma is so obviously thriving, so alive. from his wheat coloured hair to his verdant green eyes, thoma is reminiscent of life. the semi-permanent flush on the tops of his cheekbones, the careworn hands. archons, tsaritsa, he’s so bright.
childe’s smile has never looked more brittle than it does in direct comparison to thoma’s.
he reaches up a hand to hold his face, observes the way he leans in closer even in his sleep. it’s too much. it’s not enough. childe presses his thumb against the soft part beneath thoma’s jaw a little harder than he probably should, grinds his teeth together and wiggles out of the bed. he’s cold, sitting on the edge of their bed in his tank top. it’s good, though. childe was a weapon made in snezhnaya, the cold was in his marrow by birth.
sometimes the warmth radiating from thoma made him feel sick, almost. feverish. antsy. it does tonight, fills him with a yearning to numb his skin with snow and ice and battle. except he isn’t home. isn’t in snezhnaya. never is. childe can go just about anywhere, really, with his fucking ridiculous amounts of mora, but somehow he’s never in snezhnaya. he laughs a little, cuts it short by slapping his hand over his mouth. something is wrong with him.
“ajax?” comes the soft call, half mumbled into the pillow. it doesn’t respond for a moment, can barely register the fact that ajax is supposed to refer to it. blinks when it finally sinks in, stretches a smile across its face.
“go back to bed, thoma.” it tells him, cards a hand through his messy hair in a caricature of comfort. he does, blessedly— or maybe he just pretends to. it doesn’t particularly care. childe rises from where it’s sitting and leaves the room, leaves the house. it needs a battle desperately, aches with how desperate it is to fulfil a purpose. to fight. gentleness can’t hold it, doesn’t do anything but reverberate in the empty caverns of it’s soul, highlights how lacking it is in everything that a person should have.
shows that it isn’t really a person, at all.
it isn’t back until the early morning, when the sun has begun peeking over the horizon, washing the world in a golden haze. childe is clean, almost pristinely so, skin practically raw from scrubbing. thoma is silent when it slips back under the covers, could almost be mistaken for still sleeping. childe knows his breathing, though, knows these are far too shallow to be genuine.
“where have you been?” he asks, quietly, with enough clarity to confirm he’d been awake for hours now.
an apology sticks to the back of childe’s teeth, coats its mouth with the saccharine flavour of lying. it isn’t sorry to have gone. “i wanted to see the night.” childe says, and it’s honest, even if it isn’t the entire truth.
“c’mere.” thoma responds, turns around from where his back had been facing childe and takes it into his arms, holds the back of its head like he’s scared childe will run off again.
it clings to him, digs blunt fingernails into his back and tries to press as much of thoma’s warmth into its skin as possible. childe didn’t realise he even wanted to be warm again, until he had crawled home like a dying dog. until he had felt it. can’t comprehend why he goes through extremes so quickly. “sorry, i’m sorry.” he mouths into thoma’s shoulder, tries to blink away the burning dryness in his eyes.
please. god. he wants to cry, but he can’t. never can. childe settles for burying his face into thoma’s neck.
“stop wandering off, please?” thoma pleads with him, runs his lovely fingers through childe’s hair. “i worry, ajax, i can’t get any sleep. at least tell me where you go? how long you’ll be gone?”
childe wants to know what it feels like to run through thoma’s veins. to breathe him in. to get closer than skin allows. doesn’t know how to accomplish that in a way that leaves him whole, though. instead he nods when he can’t trust his own voice, twists his hands into the fabric of thoma’s shirt. “okay.” he acquiesces, only ever to thoma. can’t say more than that. hopes it doesn’t sound petulant, hopes that the sincerity comes across like he wants it to. like he’s scared it will.
they stay there, entangled, until the morning starts proper.