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It’s past sundown, and Lumine hasn’t arrived at the campsite. Childe’s not antsy, per se. He knows she can handle herself. It was just last week that he saw her wipe out an entire hilichurl camp on her own, sword flashing and skirts twirling in a deadly dance.
They’d made plans this morning to meet up, but hadn’t really decided on a time. Lumine had simply marked out a spot on his map and said “see you tonight” before rushing off on whatever wild goose chase the Adventurers’ Guild had in store for her.
Still, waiting by the fire is beginning to take on the interminable quality of waiting on the ice for a fish to bite, deep in the Snezhnayan winter. Not that Lumine is a fish, or that he’s trying to catch her—um, not unless she wants to be caught, in which case it would be only chivalrous to assist—and her eyes are definitely not as dead as the eyes of some of the fish he’s seen on the other end of his line—in fact, people say his eyes are dead, and wouldn’t that make him the fish–
Childe shakes his head abruptly to shove the thoughts of fish from his mind. Okay, maybe he is a little antsy. Only because he’s getting hungry. Any worries he feels for Lumine’s safety are purely platonic and comrade-ly. It would just be really inconvenient if he had to go save her before he’d even had dinner.
Thinking of dinner brings him full circle to the fish thoughts he’d been trying to avoid in the first place. Specifically, to the octopus he’d bought from one of the fishermen in Liyue Harbor (at an exorbitant price! Childe would have caught his own, if only he’d had time) before heading out of the city to meet Lumine. He’d left it in the stream to stay cool, tied to a rock; he hopes it hasn’t come loose and floated away. Or come back to life and swum away. Which is unlikely, but you never know. He decides to check.
He stands from where he’s been sprawled on a log for the past little while, stretches and feels his joints pop. Grabbing a lantern, he walks to the stream and peers into the waters. He sees a red thing bobbing with the current, which on further scrutiny does look like the octopus he bought.
He kind of wants to poke at it.
He tries valiantly to resist the urge, but the instinct to poke at something bobbing in the water is embedded in centuries of human genetics. Childe hardly has the wherewithal to fight it. He gives in, setting one foot gingerly on a rock that looks less slippery than the others around it.
“Going for a dip?” a familiar, quiet voice asks from behind him. Startled, Childe takes his attention off the rock for a minute and ends up planting his foot squarely into the stream, drenching his foot and pant leg in freezing water. He splutters, more from shock than actual cold—he is Snezhnayan, after all—and hears two voices erupt into laughter behind him.
“Very funny, Traveler,” he grumbles as he withdraws his foot from its impromptu ice bath. “Enjoy sneaking up on me?”
“We weren’t trying to sneak up on you,” Paimon says. “You were just engrossed in the stream. What’s in there, anyway?” She flies towards him and tries to peer into the dark water.
“None of your business,” Childe responds petulantly, crossing his arms, realizing as he does so that he definitely sounds like Teucer when he’s having a fit.
“Not fair! Paimon wants to know what’s in there,” the fairy whines, stamping her little foot in the air.
“Come on, Paimon,” Lumine says, sitting down and pulling out a slightly smushed bag of… something. “Dinner time.” Paimon immediately dives for the bag, previous grievance forgotten, and begins cramming the Fisherman’s Toast into her mouth.
As Childe approaches the campfire, he notices two things. One is that the Traveler is not eating much. She’s barely picking at her Fisherman’s Toast—rightfully so, he thinks disdainfully, as it looks rather the worse for wear after bouncing around in her backpack the whole day. The second thing is that she looks… tired. More so than usual. She’s always off running errands and saving cities, so she often looks tired, but he’s never seen her look quite so worn out before. Like a wineskin without any wine in it, deflated and purposeless.
Paimon finishes her Fisherman’s Toast, then finishes Lumine’s. Sated, she says a quick goodnight to Lumine, who musters up a smile in response, then disappears, presumably to wherever she sleeps (Childe isn’t quite clear on that).
So now it’s just him and Lumine, sitting on opposite sides of the fire. His leg, stretched out by the flames, is starting to be warm but still uncomfortably wet. Lumine’s eyes flick down to it, and she laughs quietly. “Sorry about startling you earlier,” she says, and this time he can hear the exhaustion in her voice.
“Comrade, are you–” Childe starts, and then pauses, thinks better of it. What would he even ask? Are you okay? Are you feeling alright? None of it would elicit any response other than “I’m fine, thank you for asking”—because the Traveler is stubborn and allergic to asking for help, and he knows this from long experience. So instead he asks, “Are you hungry?”
She raises her golden eyes to his blue ones. They catch the firelight, illuminating something ancient that she tries to hide in the daytime. Something old, and terrifying, and beautiful. He finds himself thinking, not for the first time, that if she wanted to be caught—not like a fish but like a woman, however one catches a woman—he would be honoured to be the one to catch her.
“Um,” she says. “Paimon ate my Fisherman’s Toast, but I guess I’m not too hungry.”
“You don’t sound too sure,” Childe observes.
“I should probably eat,” she admits, tipping her head back and closing her eyes. “It’s just been a long day. And anyway, I don’t have any more food on me at the moment.”
“I have food,” Childe says, desperately pleased to be of use (thank gods none of the other Harbingers are here to watch him fall over himself to be useful to a rival). “I can cook for you.”
Lumine cracks open one eye, clearly interested in the prospect of a free meal. “Would you?” And then that heroic, stupidly self-sacrificial instinct that puts her on the front lines of every fight prompts her to add, despite her exhaustion, “I could help, if you want.”
“No need,” Childe says, finding himself back on familiar ground. He loves cooking, could do it in his sleep. Tonia complains that nobody back home can make seafood soup like he does, and he takes not-so-secret pride in being his little sister’s favourite chef. “I got this, Traveler.”
He walks over to his pack and pulls out a large copper pot, which startles Lumine into a laugh. “Why do you carry that around?” she asks. “Don’t the Fatui feed you enough?”
“Nothing like a home-cooked meal,” he counters, leaning over her to snag a few more logs of firewood from behind her seat. (He doesn’t miss the way her eyes widen as he gets close, the way they flick to the exposed skin of his stomach and instantly flick away.) “You think the Fatui can cook my mother’s borscht? Not a chance. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
He throws the logs onto the fire and pauses to watch as the sparks crackle into the night sky. They look like stars, but closer and more vibrant, dancing as they seek their kin in the dark expanse above. Childe has always loved the stars.
He walks to the stream, pot in hand, and liberates his octopus from where it bobs tethered to the rock. He manages to avoid another nighttime dip, which is a relief both for his freezing foot and for his ego. Then he tries to fill the pot with water, but carrying a full pot and an octopus (which are wriggly little bastards in death as well as in life) proves to be harder than he assumed. It squirms at the end of its rope, throwing off his balance and making the water in the pot slosh. The rope is a little too long for him to hold it comfortably without letting the octopus drag on the ground. He tries to fling it over his shoulder without using his hands, but it just sort of hits his collarbone and bounces off, leaving a cold, wet patch of jacket in its wake.
Lumine, who has been watching this whole comedy routine, finally comes to his rescue, giggling. Their fingers brush as she takes the pot from his hands—her fingers are slender and calloused, he notices, with scars that splay across her knuckles—leaving him free to wrangle his new nemesis, the octopus.
“Thanks,” he mutters gruffly, a little embarrassed at being bailed out from a predicament of his own making. (He realizes belatedly that he could have used his Hydro vision to fill the pot. Maybe he actually gets stupider the closer he gets to Lumine. It certainly feels like it sometimes.)
She’s walking back towards the campfire and casts him a glance over her shoulder. The fire flares as if in response to her movement, throwing her profile into sharp relief. It turns her eyelashes into spun gold and traces the line of her lips—only for a second, but it’s enough to make Childe’s heart stutter. “You know where to find me next time you need someone to save you from an octopus,” she says, mirth in her voice. As he starts after her, he finds that he can’t really resent the situation that much if it made Lumine laugh.
He sets about cleaning the octopus as the water boils. He cuts away the eyes and beak with a practiced hand, pulls out the entrails as the ink gushes out against his hand (or whatever weird liquids are in an octopus, he doesn’t know, he’s not a biologist), before he stops to wonder if Lumine is squeamish. He wouldn’t hold it against her if she was—his little brother Anthon refused to eat octopus for a month after seeing it prepared for the first time—so he glances up to check on her. But she’s watching him in fascination, eyes fixed on the movement of his hands. She notices him pause and looks up at him, one eyebrow arched as if to ask why he’s stopped the pre-dinner entertainment. He shrugs and continues chopping.
When he’s done with the octopus, he throws it in the boiling water and moves on to the other ingredients—tomatoes, potatoes, other herbs that have been languishing in his pack. He’s glad he brought them along; he wasn’t sure if he was going to cook tonight, but he thought there was a good chance he’d need them. The rhythmic shhk-shhks of the knife on the cutting board are soothing, and it isn’t long before he sees Lumine’s eyes start to flutter closed. Her head droops, her tense hands unfurling like flowers blooming shyly in spring. As glad as he is to see her resting—it’s a rare sight for the overworked and underpaid Traveler, and he selfishly wants to savour the moment a little longer—he can’t let her fall asleep on a log and probably knock her head on something.
“Traveler. Comrade,” he says, and she starts awake, going for her sword almost on instinct. He holds his hands up, covered as they are in bits of octopus and tomato skins. “Whoa there. You were falling asleep.”
She looks a bit sheepish and lets go of her sword. “Sorry. It’s just been–”
“–been a long day, I remember,” Childe cuts her off, and suppresses a grin when Lumine glares at him. “If you want to go to sleep, you don’t have to stay up for this. We can eat it in the morning.”
She pouts, and this time he really does grin. “You promised me food, you horrible man.”
“It will take a while for this to boil,” he says, throwing some of the ingredients into the pot. “You’ll only fall asleep again.”
“Let me help, then I won’t doze off,” she offers, getting up.
Childe has to admit it’s a good idea. He doesn’t want her to wear herself out, but it’s always nice to have some company on cool evenings. Not that he’s lonely, of course. He’s quite used to being alone at this point. None of the Harbingers are particularly interested in socializing, and the recruits are terrified of him. Childe himself doesn’t put much energy towards making friends. But it’s… nicer than he remembers to be around people.
“You can help me chop this, then,” he says, stepping away from the cutting board. She claims the position behind the tree stump he’s been using as a table, bumping him out of the way with her hip. Taking up his knife, she juliennes the carrots with the same ferocious grace she exhibits in their weekly spars, which he finds perhaps more attractive than he should.
With most of his job taken care of, Childe settles himself by the fire and takes out half a loaf of bread. Lumine laughs at him from where she’s moved on to chopping herbs. “Honestly, why do you carry all this around? It must be heavy, not to mention bulky.”
He waves his hunting knife at her as a mock threat before starting to slice the bread. “I can’t count on anyone but myself to keep me fed. In fact,” he muses teasingly, “I seem to recall a certain comrade packing Fisherman’s Toast for herself, but none for me.”
Even in the fire’s flickering light he can see her blush. “Sorry,” she says. “I forgot we were supposed to meet you.” She sounds embarrassed and a little confused. The Traveler is not the forgetful type; it must have been a really long day to make her this scattered. Or a long week, month, year.
“I was only teasing,” he assures her, hoping to wipe that look of disorientation off her face. “I carry all this around because I enjoy cooking. And I promise you that my food is leagues better than that mushy Fisherman’s Toast you were hauling around Teyvat.”
“I believe you,” she says, and he’s relieved to hear a smile return to her voice.
They fall into silence for a moment, him toasting the bread over the fire with a toasting fork, her chopping garnishings. It’s nice. Almost domestic, although Childe would never admit that even to himself. It kind of feels like home.
He gets up to stir the pot, stretching as he does so. The lines of his body throw long shadows behind him. He turns to grab the wooden spoon on the log bench and notices Lumine watching him. He slows, lips parting, captivated by the way the shadows play in the hollow of her neck and along her jawline. They make her look powerful, unyielding. Like someone—something—you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway. Childe is used to being the most dangerous thing around, but she kicks his ass every week. He usually finds it terribly attractive. But right now, he’s struck by the thought that she could kill him if she wanted—and worse still, that he would let her.
He realizes that he’s staring. But Lumine doesn’t shy away from his gaze, offering him a small smile before setting the knife down and walking towards him. “I think I’m done chopping,” she says, settling on the bench. He nods, suddenly unsure of himself. Picks up the spoon and gives the soup a stir, watching it become as muddled as his own thoughts.
The silence returns in full force. This time it has an edge to it, with Childe fully aware that the woman seated behind him is in the perfect position to slit his throat. The Harbinger position comes with its fair share of close calls, so he’s quite used to staring death in the face before breakfast. But to willingly let an enemy—someone who should be his enemy—camp out with him, share a meal? This isn’t a regular job hazard, this is just sheer stupidity. Childe can almost hear the way the Balladeer will snicker when he turns up dead.
But somehow, the atmosphere is still not unpleasant. Childe hasn’t met a lot of people who can best him in one-to-one combat, apart from the other Harbingers (and he’s not sure about some of them, he’s pretty sure he can kick Scaramouche’s puny ass). He likes Lumine, likes how she treats him like an equal, or at least a rival. There’s a certain… respect (?) between him and the Traveler. They have an understanding, Childe decides, turning over a piece of toast. That’s as good a name as any for the weird tension that exists between them, the undercurrent that keeps him coming back to her despite all the reasons he shouldn’t. They’ve got each other’s backs.
Behind him, Lumine draws in a deep breath. “That smells delicious,” she sighs.
“Should be almost ready now,” Childe says, getting up to taste the soup. Mm, might need more salt.
“Let me try,” Lumine says, hopping off the log to lean over the pot. Instinctively, Childe scoops some soup into his spoon and holds it to her mouth—and then freezes, realizing that this is perhaps not the most platonic move. But Lumine doesn’t seem to mind. She encircles his wrist with her hand to stop him from moving, then blows on the soup. Childe tries not to shiver at the feel of her breath against his palm. She takes a dainty sip. “Needs more salt, I think,” she says, then takes another contemplative sip, still holding on to Childe’s wrist. “This is really good.”
“Glad you like it,” Childe says. His voice comes out a little too breathless, but Lumine (thankfully) doesn’t seem to notice.
Lumine retrieves some salt from her own pack and sprinkles it into the soup with a practiced hand. She steals the spoon from Childe’s hand, tastes the soup again, tips her head to the side like she’s thinking, then adds another dash of salt. This time, when she tastes the soup, it seems to satisfy her. She ladles out the soup into two bowls as Childe, recovered from his temporary shutdown, retrieves the toast from where he stashed it.
The two of them settle down to eat, side by side on a log bench. Childe dips his bread in his soup and watches Lumine follow suit, ripping off chunks of bread like she’s starving. She chews thoughtfully on the octopus and he’s concerned for a moment that she won’t like it, that it’s overcooked. But then she swallows (he does not watch the movement of her throat) and gives him an approving nod. “This is fantastic,” she says, turning her face up towards his. “Colour me impressed, Tartaglia. I never figured you for a good cook.”
He feigns hurt. “What, just because I’m a bloodthirsty maniac and an irredeemable scoundrel?”
To his surprise, the smile on her face drops. “Don’t call yourself that,” she snaps—which is funny, because it’s only the truth. He is both of those things—takes pride in them, even—and they’re hardly worse than what other people have called him. But something about the twist of Lumine’s mouth makes her seem… sad? About him calling himself names? He will never understand her. (But he would like to try.)
“I… sorry,” he says, awkwardly, spoon frozen halfway to his lips.
Lumine stares at him for a moment. “You know you’re not– You know that’s not–” she starts, then shakes her head in frustration.
“I’m not what?” Childe asks, putting his spoon back down, because at this moment there is nothing that matters more to him than what this golden-haired Traveler thinks of him.
She huffs a sigh, bites her lip. “That’s not who you… are,” she says, then holds up a hand. “I’m not saying you’re not bloodthirsty, or a scoundrel, because you categorically are. But there’s… more to you than that. You’re not a weapon, Childe.”
Childe stares at her, processing. He wants to say a million things—that he would be a weapon if the Tsaritsa demanded it; that he would be a weapon if Lumine just asked nicely; that he wants to do more, to be more for her, but he doesn’t know how.
Instead he just says, “Okay.”
Lumine searches his face for… something. He holds her gaze, even though he doesn’t know if he can give her what she’s looking for. He tries not to think about how close their faces are, how easily he could just lean down–
Eventually she sighs, drops her gaze to her bowl, reaches out to pat his knee. “Well, if you ever feel like switching careers, I’m sure the Knights would be happy to have you.”
Childe barks a laugh at this mental image, and she laughs with him. The idea of him in one of those fussy Favonius uniforms is too ridiculous for words. But he glances down at Lumine and realizes that he appreciates the sentiment, nevertheless.
They pick their spoons back up and keep eating. Lumine passes on an invitation from Zhongli to join him for tea one of these days, and Childe gripes about betrayal and cruel gods and promises to drop by Wangsheng Funeral Parlor someday soon. Then he reads her a recent letter from Teucer—Lumine laughs and blushes at the description of the pretty lady who took care of him when his big brother was on toy selling duty. When they run out of things to chat about they fall into a comfortable silence, their spoons scraping loudly on their wooden bowls.
Childe finishes the soup in his bowl and goes for a second helping, pleased to see Lumine doing the same. The moon is high in the sky by the time they set aside their bowls, satisfied and drowsy. Childe rouses himself enough to throw a lid on the pot and tug his bedroll from his pack. Lumine piles ash over the fire, drenching the campsite in darkness, then lays out her own bedding and crawls into it. “Goodnight, Tartaglia,” she says, yawning. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Goodnight, comrade,” he murmurs, pulling his blanket up to his chin. He hears her breathing even out, marvelling even in his sleep-addled state that she trusts him enough to let down her guard next to him.
As his eyes flutter shut, Childe muses that someday he’s going to have to figure out what this thing between them means to him.
Just… not tonight.
He slips into sleep, and dreams of stars.