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“I think I’ve been telling lies,” Lumine admits to the vast expanse of the cloudless Teyvat sky. Her voice is small, no louder than a whisper. It's the voice of a child.
The stars only twinkle back in response, bright as gems even as they’re eons away, and Lumine’s heart breaks just a little bit more. She gathers her knees up to her chest and hugs them tight, resting back against the unyielding stone at the very top of Qingyun Peak until she can tip her head back, exposing her throat to the brisk night air.
“I didn’t think it counted. I was just trying to make it easier for them, so it all evened out in the end, right? All I had to do was keep up the act, and that wasn’t lying, not really,” she murmurs. She sighs, and her breath comes out in a little cloud of cold condensation. She blows out another breath, purposefully, watching as it drifts away and comes apart on the wind. It’s procrastination. She doesn’t want to be here, doing this, but she only has herself to blame.
“Aether calls it my sunshine disguise,” she continues eventually, “and that’s exactly what it is. I put on a facade - someone happy and vapid, usually - until the person I’m talking to gets comfortable and I can figure out how they want me to act. It’s fine, it works -”
Her heart twists in her chest, her stomach contracting with dreadguiltdisgust, and she scoffs and twists her fingers into the grass.
“Or, it used to.”
Even the idea of the happy, dutiful thing she pretends to be day-in and day-out makes her want to leap head first off the mountain. She knows she has to buck up and put on her Lumine-the-Traveler mask, but lately the act makes the bile rise in her throat until she chokes on all the things she can never actually be.
Disgusting, she thinks, furious at herself, pull it together.
“Aether calls it my sunshine disguise,” she repeats, murmuring around the knot in her throat, hoping to distract herself. She pulls blades of grass free from the cracks between the rocks one by one, letting them float past the cliff towards whatever is waiting below. “And he’s not wrong. He’s never wrong, the bastard. I put on a happy face and pretend I know how to solve the world’s problems so everyone around me can be at ease. I learned it from him, you know,” she tells her imaginary audience, sneering up at the stars. “He always wondered where I got it from, but it was obvious that I was just pretending to be him. I learned the hard way that no one - they don't - it’s not like they ever like me, anyways, not when I’m just being myself. They like Aether. So it’s easier to just… be Aether.”
It’s a way of living in the past, she knows. If she refuses to let go of Aether by wrapping herself in a persona that’s made up of all the best parts of him, she can pretend that maybe they’re not really stuck in this rotten, backwards world. She can pretend that they’re still in that world where the grass was red and the periwinkle sky bathed the landscape in shades of foggy mauve, where the only conflict they had to worry about was the simple challenge of usurping vindictive despots. Lumine’s greatest joy in those days was ripping still-beating hearts from their chests and leaping between worlds with their blood still staining her hands, dripping into the ether and turning into the bare beginnings of stars.
Hearts are the same in almost every world, it seems. Four little caverns to pump the blood, and veins and arteries to connect it all together. Sometimes she looks down and sees the blood caked on her hands. When she blinks it’s gone, and that’s somehow worse.
Heart-render, Lumine thinks, resting her head on her drawn-up knees, there’s a title I’d like to have kept.
“I’m surrounded by greener-looking times,” she mumbles, stuck on that thought, that there’s something from that old purple world that she’d still like to have. “I hated being back there. I worried every moment I was away from Aether’s side that someone was going to sneak up and take him from me. It’s like this every time we go somewhere new; we come to a new world and I spend all my time wishing for the one that came before. Begging the past to stay.”
She wishes it were Aether here in Teyvat, and not her. Lumine has always been too stoic. She's never needed to be personable; she's lived her life as Aether’s right hand, the iron fist enforcing his word, and been happy for it. Her strengths lie in tactics, in rallying troops and bringing them to a quick and decisive victory. People weren’t afraid of her, certainly, but they never dared to come near her without Aether there to soften her harsh personality. It's easy for her to get lost in the eons of war, the zealots she's executed, the tyrants she's unseated - it makes her awkward and callous.
Aether has never worried about being awkward. He’s a born leader. People want to see him pleased. In other worlds he was often bombarded by grannies offering him tea and gossip, or children tugging him away to show him some secret camp or toy. They would do whatever he asked just to see him smile, and he would do the same for them. Lumine knows that’s how he got mixed up in this Khanri’ah business: she doesn’t know how, yet, but she just knows that Aether saw some sort of injustice he just couldn’t let go. He always has to be the fucking hero -
But that’s not the point. The point is that Lumine knows there’s something wrong with her, something that’s eating her up inside and rotting her heart from within, and she only has a couple of hours to figure out what it is before Paimon wakes up and makes her life a living hell for sneaking away and riding between the waypoints without her.
Lumine scratches her fingernails across her bare knee, until the whole thing glows red and irritated. She hates this. What is she thinking? She’s baring her soul, speaking all of her deepest and most secret feelings out loud, confessing her sins to the stars as if they can hear her when she's so far away. She knows better than that. No one is out there listening to anything she has to say.
But she's out of other ideas, and her heart is sitting hot and heavy in her chest just like it has been for months. It’s a constant weight, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can carry it. So, she opens her mouth and speaks.
"It's not fair to any of them, my friends,” Lumine says, voice catching. “Sometimes I don’t even know why I’m so angry. Is it because my brother is missing? Or am I angry at the people who have gone out of their way to help me, because they’re proving that not everyone on this stupid, backwards continent is terrible? Sometimes - sometimes I think I should be enjoying what little time my friends have left on this earthly plane, and then seconds later I’ll hate them for ever having been born. And why? Because they’re not Aether? Because they’re part of the world that took Aether away from me? I don’t know. I don’t know… it’s not their fault, but I hate them. I love them, but I hate them. I'm so angry that they don’t seem to be as confused as me. People like Jean and Yanfei, they have purpose. What am I, what do I have? I’m nothing more than a - a catalyst, an inciting incident that prompts this world to finally solve its own injustices.”
The frustration coils in her gut, leaving her sick with regret and irritation. She laughs out loud, and it's a harsh, ugly sound. “They trapped a god in a box for five hundred years - what the fuck is wrong with Teyvat? And it’s down to what - to me, someone not even from this world? To point out their mistakes? And then they have the gall to say they’re bringing me into the fold, when without fail they turn around and treat me like an outsider, like a child.”
It’s true, all of them underestimate her. They look at her, a little blonde thing in a white dress, and they think oh, she needs someone to show her the way. They don’t know what she is. They don’t know what she can do. She feels the phantom twitch of six bright wings at her back, a well-loved sword clasped tight in her hand, a golden circlet heavy on her brow, and she aches.
“I’ve lived longer than their gods. I grew up on the wisdom of stars, eating the bitter energy of black holes, and the people around me still have this idea of me that’s small and innocent and - and incapable. Because - what - I’m trying to be nice? Do they not understand that I’m a warrior? That I kill things, every day? That I enjoy it? I watched Diluc torture an Abyss Mage without flinching, and still he thinks me both young and innocent enough that he won’t let me anywhere near his wine. I've tasted more types of liquor in more worlds than he can comprehend and he dares to tell me that I'm too young-"
Lumine interrupts herself, bumping her head sharply against the stone at her back, and repeats the motion until it stings. She lets the brief, bursting pain of it reorient her mind.
"It shouldn't matter,” she mutters, “It doesn't matter. Drink would be just one more way to distract me, and I have battles for that. This world is so uproarious that I have my choice of enemies no matter where I go. I expect an attack every time I turn a corner. Between the Fatui, the Abyss soldiers, and standard-issue civil unrest - fuck, there’s a war brewing in every single nation. No one is happy with the current world order, and they're all trying to change it all at once. And that’s not even counting the natural beasts of the land, all of them looking for a fight. It’s like Teyvat is doing everything it can to get me out of here, like - like an immune system throwing everything it’s got at a virus.” A sharp, near-hysterical giggle. “That’s me, Lumine the virus.”
The giggle threatens to grow into something more sinister, like a full breakdown, so Lumine pushes it down until she can take a deep breath without feeling like she’s going to crack some important part of her psyche. It's more difficult than she'd like to admit.
“Aether would hate the constant fighting, but it might be the one thing keeping me sane. It’s hard, and I’m so tired most of the time, but at least I don’t have to lie when I have a sword in my hand. I don’t need to pretend at empathy or put on a show, I can just do what I need to do to protect them. I can pretend -" another voice crack "- fuck. I can pretend they’re Aether and we're fighting back to back again."
Lumine’s voice breaks on her first true sob, and she buries her head against her knees for a terrible, vulnerable moment.
Lumine thinks about her friends, really thinks about them. They deserve so much more than a friend who will never really let them know her - she imagines Amber or Collei finding out that she’s been lying all this time, and her heart aches for the hurt they would feel. What right does she have to be Klee’s wayward aunt, Paimon’s caretaker, or Fischl’s loyal retainer? She might be trapped in Teyvat for now, but even the thought of staying for longer than absolutely necessary makes her heart squeeze hard in her chest. She refuses to believe that she might actually have to stay, but when she does leave - is she prepared to disappoint everyone she’s come to know?
Hilariously, the only one who would really understand what she’s doing and why would be Childe. And what does that say about her? That the person she relates to the most in the whole of Teyvat is the most fucked up, traumatized person she’s met in any world? Childe would understand, though, she knows he would. Falling into the Abyss and becoming the Tsaritsa's vanguard is as close to being torn from the sky, your wings ripped out of your back, and separated from your twin brother as it’s likely to get in Teyvat, it seems. Lumine can feel it every time they square off against each other. There’s something there in his lightless eyes, something that knows what it’s like to belong to a world that’s so fundamentally different from Teyvat. And she could say it - while they’re licking their wounds and healing up, back to back on the cold floor of the Golden House, she could speak up and tell him about the Unknown God, the Heavenly Principles, her confusion about her brother’s commitment to Khanri’ah. She could sit there and wrap her injuries, and tell him about what it feels like to devour the sweet, searing ambrosia of a blooming, growing star, and how she feels that same energy pulsing from the Visions that are scattered around the world. In return, he might tell her about the three daysmonths he was trapped in the Abyss, with no one but himself and the aching, empty chasm for company.
And then - what? Lumine’s closest, truest friend in this world, the one who knows her best, would be a Fatui Harbinger?
No. For many reasons, no. She can’t.
But she wants to. She’s lonely.
She wants Aether. She wants home, the quiet place between the stars. She wants to go back to a time when everything was beautiful and she didn't exist, every day, with a cold knot of apathy sitting hard and unforgiving beneath her breastbone. She wants every single thing she’s experienced since they first left the comfortable cradle of their creator’s hands to simply disappear, so she can take a different path. One that will ensure her brother stays by her side for the eternity that she was promised.
“Am I the only one wishing my life away?” she whispers.
The words are caught and whisked away by a brisk night breeze almost as soon as she says them, puffs of cool white snatched away by greedy drafts of mountain air. Lumine wonders briefly if Venti is trying to protect her from herself, but - no. She’s in Liyue, and he’s bound to Monstadt. Sometimes the wind is just the wind.
A crystalfly bumps and twists into view, carried too high by that same gust of wayward wind. It flutters weakly towards the mountain, towards Lumine, swinging drunkenly to and fro before crash-landing by her side. Unceremoniously, its elemental light winks out, leaving it an empty, wingless crystal husk. With a shaking hand Lumine reaches for it, scooping it up and cradling it in her hands. It’s still warm.
How many crystalflies has she snatched from the air just so she can crush them into resin? Her hand flinches and squeezes around the fly’s corpse, and the sharp jut of its pincers dig into her hand. It would be a waste to reject resources given so freely; still, her eyes fill with hot, shameful tears as she reluctantly tucks the dead crystalfly into her pack. It’s a small thing - a tiny thing, insignificant compared to anything else - but it’s just one more example of everything she does wrong, everything she’s always done wrong. Even a crystalfly would rather die than spend a single moment with her when she’s only being herself.
The self-deprecation turns to anger quickly, as is her way, and she makes a desperate noise and buries her face in her hands. “Why do I keep getting up every day like I expect it to be different than the day before? Why am I like this? They all tell me they love me but I don’t believe them, and I’m just going to abandon them in the end, like I abandoned Aether -”
- she did, she abandoned him -
"- and I didn't mean to, I don't know what happened - "
- the fear she felt in that unchanging abyss of red and grey never leaves her. It haunts her nightmares and lingers in her waking moments, taunting her with a phenomenal loneliness and the image of Aether's terrified face as the Unknown God blinked him out of existence. He was terrified, and Lumine broke her promise to protect him -
"- and now he's gone and it's my fault!"
A sob ribs its way out of Lumine’s chest. It’s a wet, painful thing that surprises her even as she makes a terrible noise around it. She gasps on an inhale and keens on the exhale, shoving her hands into her hair and gripping like the pain of it will ground her like it did before. She wants the pain to send her back into her body, back into the person she tries to be every day: the person who teases Paimon, the person who solves puzzles, and does commissions, and spends every day dilly-dallying and treasure hunting across the continent while her brother is missing.
Her heart seizes and skips a beat, and Lumine groans and presses her already-sore eyes to the balls of her knees, trying her best to curl up and stop whatever emotional thing is happening that hurts so much. She tries to push the awful thoughts away, to replace them with other ones that are lighter and softer, but.
In the privacy of the night with only the sky and stars as her witness, it’s impossible to pretend to be anyone other than the person that she is.
Lumine is alone. More than that, she’s so, so tired.
“I’m sick of faking it, but what else can I do? It’s not like I can die -” her voice breaks once again on the word, and her breath shudders in her chest for long moments as she fights to bring herself back under control. She doesn't want to think about all the fights she's thrown herself into hoping she would never come out again, knowing that there's nothing in this world that can kill her in any way that matters. It's hard to pretend that her fights with Childe are anything other than what they are: Lumine, throwing herself sword-first at the only person in this world that's truly challenged her abilities, hoping she can push him hard enough that eventually he’ll snap and pull out his Delusion. She doesn't want to hurt him like that, but it might be worth it if only to see if he can finally do some damage she can't heal from.
Dragonspine is similarly hard to justify. Why else would she fight hilichurl after hilichurl, with Albedo unflinchingly at her side? Both of them are hoping that either the fight or the cold will eventually shut down their aching bodies.
And why - why - would anyone ever willingly go into the Spiral Abyss, except to die?
A deep breath, then another. Her confessional is almost over. The stars will take her words into the void and let them spin themselves apart into nothing. This feeling is but a speck upon the fabric of time, Mother Fate once told them, and it will fade long before you do. Let it wash over you, and let it go.
What an easy thing to say, for such a hard thing to do. Lumine breathes in, holds it in her chest until her lungs start to burn, and blows it harshly out. Her body has started to shake, fine tremors that jolt through her torso and legs. She rubs her forehead over her knees and prays for it to stop. Why can’t everything be simple again, like it was when she and her brother were born?
Lumine and Aether were born in the void, in the space between the stars. Two incomprehensibly minuscule moments crashed together and became one, then split reluctantly back into two. For so long they were LumineandAether, AetherandLumine, and they were the loud thing amidst the sweet silence of time, boisterous children sitting at the knee of Fate herself. A good thing can never last, however, and soon enough they began to feel like the void was a cage instead of the infinite freedom it really was. Back then, with the stars, she was surrounded by greener pastures, and she wanted so badly to see - and how she regrets it now that she’s here, alone. Still, it was together that they decided to spread their wings and travel amongst the possibilities of the universe, and it was together that they took on physical form and learned what it meant to be mortal. Or, as close to mortal as they could get.
Aether could be happy anywhere - was happy everywhere - but Lumine has always had a taste for danger and adventure. She’s always been greedy. She likes to fight, to feel the sweet sting of a blade against her skin and know that she has helped turn the tide of a war. She would purposefully steer them towards the most tumultuous universes she could find, and Aether would follow happily behind, but - was he happy? She never thought to ask. We’re the same, she had thought, when I am happy so is he, and when he is happy so am I. It was true once, but obviously at some point they both changed.
What she wouldn’t give to exist in the void once more, with nothing but Fate and her brother for company.
“I have to take what I can get,” she whispers through shaking lips. She lifts her head and stares out at the dark, sharp peaks of the Liyue mountains, barely seeing them. A bird dances on an updraft, letting itself be carried up, up, up, until it dives back down to do it all over again. Lumine takes a breath, and then another. “I have to take what I can get,” she repeats, voice louder, if not stronger, this time.
It’s a lie, but it’s what she tells herself whenever the toll of keeping up the facade is too much to bear. Every time she thinks about spending an eternity trapped in this world with no way to access any other, her spirit withers. How much longer can the elemental powers of Teyvat sustain her, when she's been so thoroughly cut off from her true home? When she can look at the Visions, but can’t reach out and eat?
Thousands upon thousands of years, if her brother is any indication. A tear, and then another, leaks out of Lumine’s squeezed-tight eyes. I can’t wait that long to die, she thinks, I can’t do it, I can’t, I can’tIcan’tI can’t -
Her arms wind back down around her knees and her hands clench senselessly around her calves; she’ll have bruises the shape of fingerprints there, tomorrow. Her heart is shaking apart, cracking at the seams, and it hurts. Why does it hurt so much? Her chest, her throat, her eyes, it's just agony. She hates this, she hates it.
“I’ll never be able to go back,” she mutters thickly. Her voice scratches over her swollen throat, making her cough and sniff. “I can’t go back, not without Aether. And Aether doesn’t want to be found, which means he doesn’t want to go back, which means he doesn’t want me.”
Oh. That’s a sharp realization.
“We’re the same, and he doesn’t want me.”
Lumine’s voice peters out on a truly pathetic whimper. Her brother, her twin, her eternal companion, the other half of her being, he - he's actually abandoned her. They were made together, they spent a millenia together, and now he's just, what? He's decided no more, not for me, my loyalties lie elsewhere now.
Aether has spent thousands upon thousands of years here, in this world, living among the people and becoming invested in their affairs. How could he not, when he’s been here much longer than anywhere else they’ve visited? And this is exactly why they said they wouldn’t linger in any one world - if you stay too long you get attached, and they promised they would never get attached, not without the other’s total agreement. But Aether… he’s become so entwined with Teyvat that he’s seeking vengeance on behalf of her people, no matter how long-dead they might be. Long gone are the days of seeing the sights, tasting the fruits, and leaving before even a decade has passed. Aether has chosen his new home.
The truth of it stings like nothing else. Even the burning corruption of Tartaglia's blade is a balm compared to the agony of knowing that her twin has abandoned her as much as she accidentally abandoned him. She didn’t mean to, but… that doesn’t matter, does it? She still did it. She got trapped in the rivers of time and left him all alone, and now Aether is returning the favour.
She and Aether are two sides of one coin. They are inseparable, a universal constant that happens together or not at all, and Lumine will always sacrifice every last piece of her body and soul if it will allow her to ease her twin’s pain for even the barest moment. Even if it means living a lie. Even if it means living death, wishing for it with every breath that’s not occupied by Paimon or commissions or foolish plots to unseat cruel archons.
Which means that no matter how much she hates it, Teyvat is Lumine’s home, too.
“Teyvat is my home, now,” she repeats out loud, pretending her voice doesn’t crack and shatter in the middle. “I am the Traveler, the Honorary Knight, the Captain of Swordfish II, the First Sage of Buer. I belong to Teyvat.”
She expected it to feel… bigger. This moment, the one where she actually gives up and agrees to stay in Teyvat, she expected - well, she expected fireworks. An earthquake. An enemy to jump out from behind a bush and try to run her through. The Cryo Archon herself, maybe, appearing to gloat at how she’s finally won the game. Anything at all to justify the way her heart is pounding in her chest, and her stomach twists and turns and tries to reject the small dinner she ate.
Nothing happens, though. It’s like nothing changed at all.
Lumine wonders if Nahida got a notification somewhere, through Irminsul, that now both of the Travelers belong to Teyvat. Not that it matters, really, but. She wonders.
Lumine takes another moment to breathe through her panic. It didn’t help before and it won’t help now, but it at least allows her to beat back the crushing numbness in her extremities, the fuzziness around the edges of her vision. Now isn’t the time for disassociation. She unwinds her arms from around her knees, stretches her legs out and tries her best to feel the sweet, prickly pinch of blood returning to limbs that were folded for too long. She pointedly brings Aether to the front of her mind - Aether as she remembers him, not the angry, stony, caricature of a Khanri’an prince that wears his face. She recalls his kindness and understanding, his empathy, his fierce sense of justice, and she tries to use the memories to patch the holes in her tattered persona as she fits it back over her broken sense of self.
It doesn’t quite work.
Another wave of hot tears leave salt tracks down her face at the memories, and she swats them away with impatient hands.
Irritated now, Lumine stands and brushes the dust and grit off the seat of her skirt. She picks up her scarf and gloves from the ground and draws them on slowly, taking the time to make sure that her ears and fingers will be warm by the time she makes it back to Wangshu Inn. She took precious time out of her day - took time to escape from Paimon, her irritating, eternal shadow - and it would be a waste of her efforts if anyone suspected she was gone.
No sense in inspiring them to ask questions she really, really doesn’t want to answer.
The first rays of sunshine crest over the distant horizon as Lumine checks her glider, like she does before every long flight. The air is cold but the sun is warm, and it dulls the ache in her heart and gut as she pulls the lie of Lumine the Traveler tight around herself.
“How fitting,” she murmurs, “just in time for my sunshine disguise.”
Lumine smiles. It’s a tight, sad thing. She looks up at the last, fading stars in the sky and wishes them a final farewell, gripping her glider tight enough to convince herself that she won’t shake apart at the seams on the way home.