Work Text:
Childe looks over to Lumine when she sneezes.
“Hey girlie, you getting a little too cold? It is pretty late. We don’t have to stay in the water,” he teases, poking one of her puffed cheeks.
She pouts over at him, holding onto one of the roots sticking out of the boulders that lace the lake. “I don’t need to get out. It’s too hot anyways.”
Her whole face is red, illuminated in a glow from the setting sun as it filters through the evergreens along the water.
Childe thinks that if he could paint, surely he would get lost in these colors. He would bathe in them, if it meant he could live within this moment forever. If it meant he could take her to the watercolors in the sky and show her her own eyes.
She sneezes again.
His lips quirk as he tries not to laugh at her in any way that she sees, looking out over the water to where Kaeya and Diluc are busy shooting each other in the face with water guns. Albedo is beside them, an easel before them, painting away.
Mosquitoes are out in full force, skimming along the water. Waterbugs run between the reeds.
Childe watches a fish slip out of the water, catching dinner, slipping down.
His friends on the shore are safe because they’re covered in scented oils that keep any creatures from wanting to eat them.
“I could hold you,” he offers. “There’s a rock here to sit on. You’ll still be in the water.”
“Deal.”
Childe would sit on the rock, but a tiny little water snake has made a home there.
He kicks out from the boulders a bit, treading water where it’s not too deep. Lumine holds onto him, sighing. Resting her chin on his shoulder.
Her skin is cold, and as smooth as a fish with the sunscreen on. He slips his leg between hers, holding her by the waist against him.
Lumine blows a cherry on his cheek, drawing a burst of laughter from the man, who throws his head back for a moment.
She splashes cool water onto his hair, running her hand up through the locks, helping him to stay at a regular temperature. His hair turns auburn, droplets slipping down over his brows and cheeks as he admires her.
Childe’s too awed to speak.
She’s beautiful in the setting sun, and he knows that the smallest breath can move a butterfly. If he speaks, the moment will move on. The sun will continue to fall down behind the trees, a toy tossed by a child god. The trees will drink their fill and awaken as night falls, as new beings sweep between them.
But for a moment, Childe just wants to breathe, to feel this pressure on his chest from hers, to feel the water against the sides of his healed ribs. To keep this moment somewhere precious. To hold the emotion before him like a beating heart, like her pulse slipping from one to the other.
He slicks back her bangs, pushing them from her forehead with the same loving caress as a florist selecting Queen Anne’s Lace.
He still can’t speak.
The evening air is alive, the spirits within opening their eyes. They chitter and chatter about the two beings in the water together, legs intertwined, hands digging into flesh.
A squirrel nearby sings, “Do you see them down there? They’re together.”
“Yes I can see,” a dragonfly replies. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, both.”
“And long lasting,” an elderly fish says, scales blue and beautiful, lifting out of the water for a split second, lips tasting the air before they slip back under to hunt.
The two men off in the distance are still laughing. Diluc is flipping Kaeya off, lying on his side along the bank.
Kaeya is snapping picture after picture of the surly man, grinning with mischief.
Beside them, Albedo listens to all of the sounds.
He can hear the ladybugs crooning their loved ones to bed.
He can hear the breeze through the trees, as they ask each other which day it is, and how warm the sky must be. As they stretch their branches out, energized from a long day sleeping in the sun.
In the distance, he can hear fox kits playing. They sound surprisingly similar to the two tumbling men beside him, who are very nearly slipping into the water.
But even they soon quiet down, falling silent in the face of nature that is both much older and much younger than they are.
To a human, a squirrel’s life is not nearly long enough. To the squirrel, the human lives for long, and knows much, but not where the best nuts are, no, no. And not where the healthiest trees are. And they’ll never find them.
And to the beings in the trees, singing from their nests, the watchers, humans live long but they are remembered on and on. Do they sing to each other? Will these ones pass on stories, once the night has embraced them all?
Albedo promises to set up a perfect scenario for his friends to sing to each other, tonight.
He can practially feel the humming in the air.
The lake before him has captured his attention. He slips hidden notices into the landscape. A bird between the branches. The fish between the reeds. An artists’ liberty of the fox kits, in this scene placed just distant to Childe and Lumine’s spot in the water, where the tiny dreams can play on the soft grass of the meadow nearby.
Childe and Lumine he paints without meaning to. The red of Childe’s hair, turned to fire. The blonde of Lumine’s, which for a moment appears around her head like a stunning halo.
Albedo paints his own hand to capture the colors, fervently now.
Diluc, sensing the energy, glances up at him with lips parted. Albedo is nearly panting, lost in the woods in every sense of the word.
Does he know where he is?
No, but does the human care? What does it matter, in the face of such beauty?
The peril of all humans has become the guiding heartbeat, the muse of his longings.
Childe is smiling, staring up at the Lumine he’s holding with all the love of a man about to go off to war. With the care of someone whose back is to the battle, who knows he isn’t returning but who has cherished every moment with this being before him, who is neither man nor god but simply another part of the nature he has always loved.
Lumine is resting on him, so close it’s hard to tell how their legs could be intertwined, though Albedo knows from how well he knows them. Her legs are wound on the man’s waist, and she’s sitting on his hip, their chests flush.
She’s smiling, and for a moment her eyes are glimmering.
Childe’s lashes are blocking any light from entering his, so that he looks as if he is already falling into the cavern of death. The shadow crosses the lake behind him, given by trees, so that the man is delving down to the depths.
Lumine is in the light, the water around her almost red, no, it is red. Red and orange and burning profusely with something she cannot reach, but can always feel.
The scars on her back glisten for a moment in lake water, and one speckle of white knotted skin on Childe's collarbone catches the light.
And for a moment they’re almost breathing on the painting.
Then Albedo gets the urge to destroy it. To run his paintbrush through, and wreck the image before him.
Surely, he’ll never have love like that. Surely, to reach for perfection is to fall into the ocean, wings burnt and wax along his back.
But he sets the paintbrush into his mouth and takes a step back, letting out a long sigh.
Taking up the edge of the brush, then setting everything down and putting it away. Leaving the painting safe on the easel.
He will glaze later. He will sign later. He will autograph when his hands aren’t shaking.
Sometimes, there are things in the forest which don't want the beauty to be seen by anyone. It’s too dangerous. Beauty is chased after, after all. Stolen.
Albedo looks to the water, where Childe is staring at Lumine as the sun sets over them, as the shadows fall on them, turning their hair purple. Bathing Lumine in darkness.
Childe presses a fervent, dying kiss to Lumine’s lips, and Albedo is thankful that his painting didn’t topple into the water with the breeze.
As the sun sets and Lumine looks into his eyes, she wonders if Childe knows that he’s always been a child of the woods.
There’s an electric bait in his eyes, a humming under his skin that she can palpably feel.
Some people are human. Some humans are monsters. Some people are something a bit left of strictly human, some bloodline in their history mixed up with someone with bright blue eyes and too-sharp teeth who slipped out of the woods “for work” and sang loudly and was gone in ten months, leaving behind a babe and string of broken hearts.
Some people have histories of running into the woods and going missing and returning a bit more like the woods than the city that longed for them, that reached out for them.
Some people can be seen more clearly when the sun goes down.
Lumine leans forward, pressing fervent kisses to Childe’s eyelids, gripping his slick face with all the love of someone kissing the statue over their lover’s grave.
To love is all the sweeter when that love can be taken, because whatever it is she loves is far more than the sum of the body before her. He could sink beneath the waves, and he would not disappear for a second, his heartbeat forever trapped within hers.
And even long after they are gone, they’ll live on in this lake, where the water laps around one spot where lovers found the sun and moon in one evening.
The squirrels will chitter, “remember them?”
The birds will sing assent.
The fish will ask if they hunted their dinner.
The bugs will joke that they ran through the trees.
And Albedo will have his painting.
But death is a long way off tonight. The fervent nature of Childe’s eyes promises warm grins, and hearty smiles, and a feverish hand against her back.
Lumine sinks into his lips with a giggle, and then Kaeya is wolf whistling from the sidelines, and the whole of the forest is exclaiming at this man, and he’s snickering, and they’re all climbing out of the water, stamping along the grass, heading past the wildflowers, grabbing a few with a quick, “Thanks,” and going to build a campfire out of the range of the trees, wishing on marshmallows and sparks like they’re shooting stars, asking for wonderful days and sweet nights.