Chapter Text
Zhongli stood over the waves of the Guyun Stone Forest long after the Traveller’s footsteps disappeared down the mountain. Bless that boy, he had stood with him for as long as he could stand the wind. He folded his arms against the chill coming in from the ocean, listening to the soft hush of the water and tasting the hum of this place’s power in the back of his throat. Osial would one day rise again, in hatred and in pain, to re-wreck destruction and sometimes he couldn’t even find it in himself to blame him.
Death comes eventually, to everything, but sometimes the road to that end is far too long. He would never be able to tell the Traveller what he traded his Gnosis for, but it was he who put the clause of silence into that contract. A practical decision but also… he didn’t wish to spend the end of his life trying to explain himself.
Footsteps tapped against the inside of his skull. His senses, deeply attuned to this place, picked up the presence of another long before his human body could have heard them. These stones were almost him. He felt as they did. So when Childe’s head crested the top of the stone spear, he had already turned to greet him.
“How long have you been up here by yourself?” Childe asked, hopping the last few rocky steps in one youthful bounce. “I was starting to worry some debt collectors had finally gotten to you.”
“Why is it that whenever you have time, you decide to seek me out?” Zhongli replied, a soft smile spreading across his face. He was… relieved to see him. The solitary aura of this pseudo-cementary had been starting to wear at him. Childe’s face coloured, though it may have been the cold.
“What can I say? Someone’s got to make sure you’re not dead.”
Zhongli smiled and looked back over the ocean. Then there was a hand on his shoulder roughly turning him around. “Ah-ah!” He blinked in shock as Childe continued speaking. “Not so fast, I saw that look.
“Don’t get all mysterious on me now, Zhongli,” he said as he physically turned him away from the ocean. “What’re you even doing up here, anyway?”
This was a good question. Zhongli wished to look over him and out at the sea separating Liyue from Inazuma, but he’s already been called out once. Instead, he looked into Childe’s eyes - which were remarkably similar to the expanse of water stretching endlessly behind him. “I was… musing, I suppose. Thinking about how time flies.”
“Ahh, a very healthy endeavour for someone 6,000 years old.”
“Are you…” Zhongli frowned, thoughtful and a little confused. “Being sarcastic?”
“I’m just saying, I climbed a mountain to come find you. Forgive me if it looked like you wanted to jump off.”
The old god blinked in surprise. “I…” What an odd thing to say. “I merely wasn’t ready to return to Liyue yet. I had much on my mind.”
Childe walked past him and shifted to sit down on the edge of the spear. He reached into his pack, pulled out two small, sweet-smelling packages and held one up to him. “Here. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
A gloved hand reached out to take it. He unwrapped it, and the smell of the diced meat mingled with the salt air. A little more life filled his lungs. Childe spoke again, accompanied by a hearty slap of stone that could have shattered a weaker man’s hand. “Sit next to me.” Zhongli complied with a grunt.
Below them, blue water turned black. This place was a prison of something endlessly restless and as ancient as Zhongli, and he could feel it tossing against the spears holding it in place. Their legs dangled over the unfathomable drop. Zhongli’s expression flickered. I’m sorry. I would kill you if I had the strength.
“What’s on your mind?” Childe’s question drew him back out of his head. Sometimes it felt like he needed something to just take hold of his consciousness and grip onto it, to keep it in the present day. He didn’t look up, but he did take a bite of food before answering. It filled him a little bit and warmed him up.
“Time moves very quickly…” he began. His expression creased, in a way that Childe could only read as an anguished sort of confusion. “It’s difficult to keep myself in the present sometimes. To live in Liyue amongst my people is a blessing but… some day very soon I will wake up and everyone will be gone. Again.
“It can get confusing sometimes, to know whether I’m lost in my memories or existing in the here and now. A memory from a thousand years ago feel the same as a memory from yesterday, and when I’m by myself I feel…” His words slowed.
Childe listened, then nudged the hand holding his Mora meat upwards when he came to a stop. “Keep eating.” Zhongli did. The boy took the time while he was occupied to form some sort of reply.
“I’m not even going to pretend like I know what any of that means,” he began, very much nineteen and feeling it. But he dug down deep as his own teeth tore through his meal. “But you’re done now, right? You don’t need to live in the past.”
“It’s not a matter of needing to-”
“Then great!” Childe chirped. Zhongli chuckled despite his own melancholy. He chewed, then swallowed.
“It’s the natural way of my mind. I can fight it no more than I could fight sleep.”
“Then…” Childe rolled the sound around in his mouth, buying himself time that Zhongli would happily give him even if he was in silence, “Treat it like sleep. Give it the time, but then wake up.”
Zhongli looked over at him. He just watched him for a while, as the waves lapped at the rocks below and the wind rushed through their hair. He could not dismiss such simple advice. Childe nudged his elbow again. “Hey. You stopped again. Keep going.”
“Oh, yes, sorry.”
“You’ve got such grand problems,” Childe chuckled. “But sometimes you just need a nap and a good meal. That’s what my mother used to say, and she was almost always right.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Zhongli replied with a soft smile, holding the pastry near his mouth to prove that he wasn’t abandoning it again. “She raised a wise son.”
Childe’s whole face lit up. “See! This is what I keep telling people.”
They fell into another silence, but this one was punctuated by the polite sounds of eating. Childe waited until his friend had made it to the final bite, then shuffled closer and looped their arms together.
“What… are you doing?” Zhongli asked, but he didn’t move.
“Pulling you back to the present. You were getting lost again.”
A little ripple of laughter escaped Zhongli that time, stronger than before and less under his control. As the wind blew through the Guyun Stone Forest, his voice had a certain old, loving mirth to it. “So I was.”