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They spar again.
It’s one of Childe’s favorite things to do. There’s nothing more attractive than someone who could actually kill you, and Lumine has thousands of years of experience within her small frame. She wields her blade unlike any other person he’s encountered in Teyvat, and he revels in that.
He flips his daggers in his hands, letting them flow into the shape of a polearm. “Getting tired?” he asks. “You can always give up. I’m a nice guy, I’ll let you off easy.” Childe admits that he’s lying on that last part; he doesn’t want to see her give up. It’s always better when she struggles and fights for victory til the heaving end. That’s the kind of mettle that only she has.
Lumine spits blood out of her mouth and uses the back of her hand to wipe the rest off. “Not so quick,” she says. “You haven’t even used your Delusion yet. That’s just lazy on my part.”
She raises her blade again and readies herself. Childe knows her bladework well by this point; it marks her apart from any other person he’s sparred with before. She tends to take more offensive attacks — like when she dives forward with the sharpened edge of her blade taking the brunt of that motion for more force — but it leaves her weak spots easily open. It’s a bold strategy, one that Childe suspects was borne out of so many years fighting with her brother instead of as one, but she’s getting better at covering it. Childe blocks a blow from her and notes how Lumine falls into an Inazuman stance in a split second to cover her left side. She fluidly shifts back into her usual fighting style and slashes forward with even more aggression than the last strike.
Childe twists the Hydro in his hands into Electro, and he feels that familiar burn along the back of his spine: the consequence of using his Delusion. But it’s worth using it, even if it's just for a greater sliver of victory. Lumine isn’t fazed though and she blocks his strike with her own blast of Electro. Then, she stomps the ground with her back foot, making Geo resonate along the training grounds. Childe has no choice but to stumble back and brace himself for another slash from Lumine. This technique is from Mondstadt, and she uses that slash once, twice, before she turns and stabs her sword downward like the polearm masters do in Liyue.
If she’s trying this hard, it would look poorly on Childe to not put in the same amount of effort. He stretches out a hand, curling it around the few strands of Hydro leftover in the air, and tugs it hard. A wave of water answers his call, and he uses the force of it to rush forward and strike at Lumine’s left. She always starts off attacking with a swing from the right, so there’s nothing to guard her left at this moment. Electrified water crashes into her side, and Lumine is thrown back from the sheer force of his strike. Childe uses this to press his advantage.
With his Delusion, he makes a blade out of Electro and stabs it down into the ground, making the leftover water crackle with electricity. Then, he races forward and starts battering Lumine down with a series of quick strikes. Left, right, left, right, and then he twists to bring his blade in an arcing spiral before crashing it down on top of her. She takes the first two hits, paralyzed by the water, but she quickly recovers and leaps back with the help of some Geo.
“Interesting strategy,” Lumine pants out. “I thought you liked a more hands-on approach than this.”
“Don’t worry,” Childe assures her. “I’ll get handsy in a second.” He doesn’t even wait for her reply before he starts raining down arrows on her. Lumine has to run and dodge each and every one. None of them hit, but a fair few of them graze her arms, leaving slight beads of red in their wake.
Lumine skids to a halt and then with a sharp twist of her wrist, she sends a volley of Geo rumbling through the ground. It disrupts some of Childe’s aim, and she uses that opportunity to hurtle forward and start slashing at him again. She gets him on the left arm, sword slicing through his sleeve and drawing fresh blood. He’s too hopped up on adrenaline to even feel it properly and focuses his attention on blocking the next strike. They get locked into place momentarily — her steel lodged against his water blade — and Lumine pants out, “Come on now. Do your worst.”
A smile cuts through Childe’s lips as he replies, “As you wish.”
Lumine moves faster now, slashing and parrying his attacks with an inhuman ease, and she’s using the full extent of her elemental abilities to her advantage. Her use of Geo steadies her feet and keeps her defenses up. The air around her crackles with Electro, making it dangerous to be in close quarters with her. Childe doesn’t care; he presses even closer with a grin.
Just as he’s about to land a hit on her, she vaults upward into the air using Anemo. She’s impossibly high to reach, and Childe barely manages to stay on his feet after her gust of wind buffets against him. As he watches Lumine, she twists oddly in the air, shoulders flexing. But then, her eyes widen, and she falls.
She plummets fast and there’s no sign of additional Anemo to keep her upright. Childe’s throat tightens, and he swears he can hear his own blood roaring in his ears as he lunges forward, hands outstretched. It’s not good enough though. He’s not going to reach her in time. There’s no other option.
Childe swears under his breath and then pulls on his Abyssal energy. He would gladly pay the pain if that meant saving her. The air starts pulsing and then gravitating towards him as he activates his Foul Legacy form. Miniature supernovas burst around him in purple light before collapsing into the black hole that is his body, and he barely manages to catch Lumine in his clawed hands.
She’s shaking, and a few of her teardrops fall onto Childe’s armor. Lumine looks up at him, still cradled in his arms, and he’s startled to see the anger burning in her eyes. Another tear slips down her cheek as she says, “I thought, for a second, I forgot, I forgot I don’t have them anymore?”
“Have what?” Childe asks, voice far deeper and resonant in this form. It echoes against the confines of his mask, but he doesn’t dare to take it off. Not in front of her. He doesn’t know what he would do with himself if she found him horrifying in this form, without this mask.
“My wings,” Lumine spits out. She bends, just enough for Childe to see her back. Her dress leaves it bare, showing off the only scars Childe has ever seen on her. There are two scars, puckered and jagged, running along her shoulder blades that flex and move every time she moves her arms or shoulders.
For some reason, in spite of everything that Lumine has gone through, she only retains these two scars on her body. Bruises, cuts, and wounds heal abnormally fast, and her skin remains as smooth and pale as the crescent moon. When Childe asks about it, she always shrugs and says that she’s not from this world as her only explanation. Even after Inazuma, when Lumine returned with lightning-like burns from the Raiden Shogun herself, the scars dissipated after a few weeks as if they were never there. But these? These have been on Lumine’s body ever since Childe first met her all those months ago in Liyue, and these have remained as the only sign of violence on her body. He’s never asked about them, but it makes sense. The only sign of her wings left.
Lumine doesn’t mention her wings often, only in passing every now and then, but right now, she snarls, “That god, that thing , she tore them off my brother first and made me watch as he screamed. Then, it was my turn and it—” She breaks off with a sharp hiss. Lumine rubs at her eyes roughly, smearing more tears across her face, before she presses her forehead to Childe’s breastplate. There’s a moment of silence, filled only with the sounds of Lumine’s sharp, short breaths. Slowly, they even out, becoming more steady breaths with each passing second, and Lumine whispers, “I used to be a star. Now, I don’t know what I am.”
She looks so small in his arms like this. Granted, Childe has always been taller than Lumine, but this form makes him tower over her. He’s not sure what to say. There’s still too much energy crackling under his skin. This form wasn’t made for standing still; it was made for war. But he tries to hold her as best as he can, making sure the sharp parts of his armor and claws avoid her bare skin. His cloak billows around them, shrouding them in Abyssal black.
Childe hesitates, but the beginnings of his words thrums in his throat. Another drawback of this form: everything he says is louder. Lumine looks up at him, eyes red and rimmed with tears. He coughs and stumbles through his words as he says, “For what it’s worth, you don’t have to be anything.”
“And what if I miss what I used to be?” Lumine whispers back.
Childe shudders from the effort it takes to keep his mind together. The Abyssal blood-thirst that accompanies this form is a force to be reckoned with, and he has never tried to hold it back. Not until now. “Then you would not be who you are right now,” he tells her, voice strained and short. Too late, he can’t hold it. The false stars trapped in his cloak unravel around them, and he drops Lumine to collapse onto the ground, choking and gasping for breaths of air in his now-human lungs.
Lumine kneels by him, rubbing smooth circles in his back until he can regain his breath. Despite the pain shooting through Childe’s chest, he still notices that Lumine’s hand never touches his shoulder blades, always remaining at the small of his back. He looks up at her, and she’s not crying anymore. Instead, there’s that familiar resolve back in her face, set in the jut of her jaw and the curve of her mouth.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
Always worried, always kind, his traveler. But she is kind to everyone, and Childe would be a liar if he said that he didn’t care about that. He wishes Lumine would only worry about him, only care about him. But in this field where there are only the two of them, he can pretend. “Yes,” he tells her. “I’ll be fine, nothing new, girlie.”
She sighs and sits down beside him, sword forgotten in the grass. Lumine laces her hands together and says, “I haven’t told you much, have I?” When Childe shakes his head, she ruefully laughs, “Almost unfair of me, especially when you tell me so much about your own family.”
Childe almost says that it’s alright, but again, the truth of the matter is that he wants all of her: her past, her present, her future. But like she said, she used to be a star, and stars don’t stop for mortals. She’s always moving, always traveling, always searching across Teyvat, and so, she will never be his alone.
“Aether and I were born from two halves of the same falling star,” she murmurs. “Twins, you call it here. But honestly, stars don’t really have a concept of siblings. We just are. I don’t know who I am outside of our pair.”
“That’s not the only thing you are,” Childe says. And truly, when he looks at her, he cannot imagine how she could ever define herself by her brother. To him, she is light, pure and incandescent light that shines inexorably bright.
“No, it’s not,” Lumine agrees. “But it’s a hard shift to make. I’ve never traveled like this before.” She stretches her hand out to the sky, and the sunlight streams through her fingertips, dappling her face in light and shadow. “I suppose I’m closer to human now. It’s not hard, being human. It’s just…” Her mouth twists. “Different.”
Childe doesn’t like how bitterness looks on Lumine’s face. He leans in to place a small kiss on her cheek, fleeting and quick. She leans into his touch, and he wraps an arm around her, covering up the scars from the light of the sun. His arm still shakes — lingering effects from Foul Legacy — but Lumine doesn’t mention it at all.
There’s an ugly, vicious part of Childe that stirs, the same part that he nurtured in the Abyss, and it wonders: does being human mean that she’ll stay?
Childe fully knows what the answer is; he’s too clever to not know. She may not think of herself as the same star as she was when she fell to this world, but he knows her as light. No matter how hard he tries to hold onto starlight, it will always slip out of his grasp.
But he can love it nonetheless.