Work Text:
The air is never still, here in the upper reaches of Juyeun Karst.
Xiao is not often here, on the high lonely tops of these mountains. This is the domain of the adepti, with its deposits of amber and still pools. Mountain Carver hides in their domain not a mile away, still and thoughtful.
The low slung clouds lay around his feet, where his legs dangle off the edge of the cliff he sits on. He kicks a little idly, watching wisps of ether swirl around his feet. It's a long way down.
It's a very quiet place. Humans do not enter here, as a general rule. There are exceptions, of course, but for most, it is a place most holy, where none may enter. Save the occasional pilgrim or too-greedy Treasure Hoarder, it's a place mostly populated by the elements and the wind.
That's the usual reason Xiao isn't here- he is never far from the humans who seem to need him more every day, never far from the faint rot of evil that emanates from the very stones of Liyue.
Still. Juyeun Karst is the home of all the adepti- every adepti, even the ones like he and Ganyu and Yanfei- who do not stay.
It is because of this ownership that Xiao senses when something blurs through the boundaries of Juyeun Karst and starts walking their way up the trail, heading to the top of the mountain.
The presence is- strange, not mortal, and Xiao wonders if Aether has come to pay one of the adepti a visit.
So thinking, he shoves himself unceremoniously off the cliff, plummeting hundreds of feet before, at the last moment, shifting into a plunging attack that cracks the ground underneath his polearm.
With a neat flick of his wrist he sheathes it on his back, and then follows the faint trace of strangeness, to the outskirts of the adepti's realm.
He hears Paimon before he sees Aether- her high, squeaking voice making a serious case for one food stuff or another.
Aether's low voice says something gently back, and Paimon says, "But there's apples ahead! I can just-"
And then Paimon is right in front of Xiao, bumping into his chest and tumbling head over heels mid air.
She squeaks, waves her arms. Xiao raises an eyebrow.
"Traveller!!" she says, bouncing up briefly. "Look, look! Xiao is here!"
"Xiao!" Aether calls, and there is the sound of hurried footsteps, and Xiao frowns as there is not one set, but two, and another voice as they round the bend,
"Who?"
Xiao takes a step back. It cannot be-
Aether rounds the corner of the tight, twisting trail first. His face is pleased and open, already waving to Xiao as he says over his shoulder, "Our friend Xiao, he's an adeptus-"
And then Barbatos is there, at the turn, expression curious and friendly as he looks from Aether and meets Xiao's gaze.
Xiao stares, and his heart clenches hard in his chest, and he scowls, hard, to keep from laughing, or crying.
Who? echoes in his head for a brief moment. Heartbreak and some sort of sick shame, anger and a horrible, twinging embarrassment. Who?, like he-- he was not. He’s being a fool. Too much to think that he would be remembered by anyone, let alone a god.
Let alone an archon.
Barbatos’ meets Xiao’s gaze, already hard and furious, protecting himself against-- against what, he doesn’t know, because the next moment he’s watching, alarmed ad suddenly, completely off balance, as Barbatos’ face cracks down the middle.
A stone in a pond, a fist in a mirror.
A man who’s seen a ghost.
"What?" Barbatos croaks out. His face shows his age in strange ways, turning thousands of years older in an instant.
Aether stops short, turns, and Xiao can see the sliver of his profile drop into shock as well. "Venti, what-"
"Alatus?" Barbatos says. He’s white-faced still, the lines by his mouth carved like stone, bizarre and unyielding. His already big eyes huge in his face.
Xiao swallows. "Barbatos," he says in return, his voice gruffer than perhaps he means.
Barbatos flinches. “You’re-- here,” he says. “You’re here?”
Beside him, Aether closes his eyes, and he too sounds older than his face would suggest when he says, “Yes, Venti. He’s here. He’s-- he’s real.”
“You’re alive,” Barbatos chokes out.
Xiao’s lungs fill up with water. That’s what it feels like, at least. Like he has suddenly started swallowing salt water, unsure of how he got here. Unsure of when he suddenly lost his footing and started drowning.
Barbatos takes a few unsure steps forward, ignoring Aether's worried face, Paimon's mumbles. "I thought you were dead," he says, and though his words are thready and quiet, they crack through the still air of Juyeun Karst like a thunderclap.
Xiao takes a half step back. "What?"
"I thought you were dead," Barbatos says, louder this time. "By the fucking seven, Alatus, I thought you were dead!"
"Why?" It's the only thing he can think to say, staring at Barbato's face, drawn into a tragic mask, a near parody of emotion.
"I wake up after a thousand years and no one knows the name of Alatus," he says, and underneath the shock and betrayal-- and the grief, overwhelming and age-defying, a thousand years and a child’s tears, demanding, at the corners of his eyes-- there's something like anger building. Xiao has seen that anger before, has seen the anger of archons, knows that it is bigger than mortals, all-encompassing.
Knows that the heartbreak of archons is bigger than even that.
"No one knows the name of Alatus, and then Monstadt hears tales of the death of the Yakshas, the last bastion of defense against evil in Liyue laid low. That some nameless Yaksha died in the depths below the earth fighting against--
And then Morax--"
Barbatos chokes here, swallows hard. Grits his teeth. "Morax falls- descends- and the people of this once godly nation tell us that the age of adepti is over. That those few who are left will be retreating to the tops of the mountains until they crystallize into their oh so precious amber."
"I did not-"
"I stood at the Stone Gate and called your name," Barbatos says, vicious now. "And you did not answer."
Xiao-- Xiao doesn’t know how he reacts to that. Almost goes out of his body, for a moment, too confused, too overwhelmed. Aether takes a step back at the expression on his face, gold brows drawn together and his mouth turned down and open. Not horrified, exactly, but something close-- like he knows what it means that Barbatos said that, that he knows what it means that Xiao told him he could call for him, and he would be there.
Xiao doesn’t break his promises. He doesn’t know if he can. To hear this--
Like being told the sky isn’t blue. Like being told the earth beneath him does not exist. Like being told he is not who he has always clung to, the idea of himself breaking underneath him like ghosts slipping through his fingers.
Alatus is a ghost, to him. Perhaps a memory. Perhaps a revenant, some horror that he has nightmares about being. Someone he no longer is, and yet now he curls around Xiao’s chest. Reminds him of a time when he glowed gold, when he could not see for the dark, when it was blood and not water in his lungs.
"That is no longer my name," Xiao says. "It hasn't been for a long time."
"It was the only one I had!" Barbatos cries. "They call Mondstadt a godless city but I still-- I could not leave-- Alatus--"
He shakes his head, bares his teeth now, his pretty face twisted up in agony. It is an expression that does not suit him. "Tell me, Alatus," he says, spits, "why all my friends seem so desperate for death that they would fake their own demise."
So he knows about Morax then, Xiao thinks, dazed, forgets that the reason he came to Juyeun Karst was because he stumbled across Morax-- Zhongli-- somewhere on the wide stretches of Giuli Plains.
Forgets, for a brief moment, that he felt the same horrified relief and anger not long ago.
"How could you do this to me," Barbatos is saying, "I-- I mourned your death, I sat at the grave of the Yakshas, I performed your rites--"
And all Xiao can think to say is,
"You mourned for me?"
Barbatos' face closes, opens, the beating of a crystalfly’s wings. His eyes, anemo-green and glowing with power, with anger, with relief and terror and a sick sort of happiness, fill with some sort of emotion Xiao cannot possibly comprehend.
He bows his head. One of his braids slips forward over his shoulders. When he lifts his head again he looks tired. He looks his age. He looks beautiful as Xiao remembers him, whenever he allowed himself to remember.
"Of course I did," he says, quiet now. "You idiot. How could you ever think I would not mourn?"
Xiao had met the little god of wind-- the archon of anemo-- many years ago, now.
Once upon a time, he could say, as if he were telling the tale to a mortal child, as if he were in the habit of such-- once upon a time, Xiao was named Alatus.
Alatus, before he was a yaksha and before he was a general and before he was bloody and tired and soaked in death, was a small, delicate little thing.
A golden bird who ate dreams.
And Venti-- Barbatos-- there can be no dreams without stories, without tales and song and so yes. Alatus, winged shiny thing that he was, knew the archon.
It was only later, after the wings had been torn off, after the gold had tarnished, after the dreams faded like wisps between his new torn open fingertips, raw cuticles and dirty nails, that Alatus met the archon.
Only when Alatus had taken up the helm of general, had taken up the dirty beating heart of the karmic overload of the mountained country, and only when it had only proven too much.
How was Alat-- how was Xiao to know, that one like that would ever think to mourn what he became?
Xiao mourned Alatus, before his feathers became slick. Xiao mourned the loss of childhood nightmares between his small fangs. Xiao could understand, perhaps, mourning that innocent creature.
But Barbatos had not known Alatus then. Had only ever known him as the monstrous thing that he now was.
Less monstrous, now, Xiao thinks. Somehow.
Maybe one cannot be as monstrous, when they are so old. Maybe one cannot be as monstrous, when they are as tired as Xiao is.
Xiao doesn’t feel monstrous very often, anymore. He feels more tired, and in pain, and hurting, and monstrous, yes, but not to the point of insensibility. Not to the point of regret.
He feels regret now, staring at Barbatos’ strange drawn face in the light of Liyue’s mountains, his green-blue eyes washed out in the gold.
“You mourned for me,” he says again, slowly, scraped out of him.
Barbatos reaches out a hand. “Yes,” he says, quietly, and folds Xiao’s hand-- still raw, still bloody cuticles, still dirty nails-- into his own pale ones. They are not soft, calloused hard with strings, and Xiao thinks that he can feel music, in them, like Barbatos is playing some disconnected melody with each gentle press and pulse of his hands. “I did mourn for you, and I would mourn for you, and I will mourn for you, whenever that sad day does come to pass.”
Because Xiao is a dream-eater, former, and a yaksha, still, and maybe something else in the future. But Barbatos is an archon, and Xiao is comforted, in a way that makes his shoulders sag forward, that he cannot hope to outlive him.
Barbatos is an archon--
“How are you here?” Xiao blurts, suddenly worried. “You can’t leave Mondstadt, you can’t--”
“Ehe,” Barbatos says, and squeezes Xiao’s hand again. “Well, funny thing that…”
You can still be an archon without a gnosis. It’s just a little bit harder.
“And anyway,” Barbatos says, finishing up, and he flickers a little look at Xiao, his eyes very bright and strangely sly, almost cold, and, well.
There were seven archons, after the war. Everyone remembers Morax, Rex Lapis-- Xiao was there, he could never forget, not the spears in the ocean breaking apart the tide, not the cruelty in his face atop the mountains, not the hard hands of black and gold sending the earth in an inexorable tide.
Morax stood atop his mountaintops. Barbatos leveled them.
Seven archons, after the war. After all this time, there are only two left, who remember the horrors there.
Looking at Barbatos’ eyes, Xiao is very sure he is remembering them.
“Anyway,” Barbatos says casually, “I’m very curious to see what plans Her Majesty has up there. Very curious indeed.”
“You still shouldn’t have given it up,” Xiao says, disapproving.
Barbatos snorts. “Come now,” he says, teasing. “I didn’t have my gnosis during the war, hm? Why would I need one now?” he bumps Xiao’s shoulder with his own. They’ve migrated, during this story, perching on one of the many boulders that ring Juyeun Karst. “I got to do some play-acting, it was a bit of fun.”
Xiao sighs. He doesn’t want to know what that means. It is so easy, to fall back into old habits, let Barbatos cajole and carol and chide him, tugged along easily by his small hands, the wind at his feet.
“So you are now in Liyue,” he says.
“To pay my respects,” Barbatos says, rolling his eyes. “That old block headed fool. I could kill him myself, thinking he was leaving me alone.”
Leaving him alone, because he had thought Xiao-- Alatus-- was long dead.
“I’m sorry,” Xiao says, voice hoarse and cracked, into the sudden quiet. “I’m so sorry.”
A pause.
“Yes,” Barbatos says, and bows his head. “I am, as well.”
It is quieter, down here, at the foot of the mountains, and the shadows longer. They drift here, between their feet, their still linked hands.
The air is not still here, either, but now Xiao can once again see where the wind comes from.