Chapter Text
Liyue’s morning sun beats down on the back of Childe’s head.
He’s tramping through the wilderness like a wounded animal, except he’s not wounded at all but instead wants to attract the attention. A Harbinger such as himself should make his presence known. Covert operations have never been his forté, but war should never come as a secret, either.
Liyue Harbor should thank him, really. He’s spent the trek from the city all the way to Guili Plains clearing out monsters with a simple slash of his blades. The water dilutes the blood—Childe attributes this to the wider-known healing properties of the element. Unfortunately, Liyue Harbor is slow to forget his transgressions—slower than unmovable rock.
Memories of Osial are still fresh in their mind, and Childe can’t quite blame them.
It’s the type of story that would last for generations. Whether as a folk tale or a well-documented piece of history, he doesn’t care.
With one last step back, he pulls an arrow from his quiver and instead of centering it against his bow string, he throws it like a spear. It meets its end in a hilichurl's throat. It’s bad form, but powerful nonetheless.
Around Childe, the former hilichurl camp is a scene of a massacre. He’s never claimed to be a gentle killer, alright? But this might send a message to surrounding hilichurls—death awaits those who come close to the harbor. Such primitive creatures. It’s lucky that Liyue has someone who’s willing to do their dirty work for them.
Childe puts away his bow and approaches the last hilichurl. Its chest stays level. He reaches down and tugs the arrow from its throat. Other than the blood coating the tip, the shaft is unbroken, and the arrow overall looks to be in decent shape. He reaches back and puts it in his quiver.
A bloody arrow—what a message to leave his enemies. They aren’t special to have perished by his hand. They aren’t an exception.
This marathon of destruction that Childe is running is a distraction, rather than his main mission of the day. As the Harbinger stationed in Liyue, he has a responsibility to check in on the troops scattered around the nation periodically. And scattered they are. It’s an entire day’s trip.
He doesn’t mind it—it gives him the excuse to spend time away from Liyue Harbor and their vigilant eyes. And while Childe has never been the type of person to be fazed by social judgment, it certainly makes his daily life harder. It’s kind of difficult to grab a bite to eat when the hostess holds a personal vendetta.
A bit beyond the bloody hilichurl camp, Childe takes a rest against a pile of rocks and pulls out a list from his pocket. It’s only slightly crumpled, but he can still make out his quick handwriting. The first camp isn’t too far from him—it’s set up along the shorelines of Luhua Pool, overlooked by dilapidated ruins that are hardly a rarity in Liyue.
The path to Luhua Pool is eerily empty, so Childe takes up a jog. He stops when he comes to the entrance of the ruins to adjust his shirt collar and ruffle up his hair. His mask is still secure on the side of his head. He’s wondering what would make for the best way to greet his soldiers. Climbing down the cliff would be too embarrassing for someone of his caliber to do, obviously. Walking in unannounced is passable, but it still lacks flair.
He settles on gliding down—maybe falling to the ground with his water blades in hand to really surprise them. What an entrance that’d be.
Childe toes the edge of the cliff overlooking the camp. He kneels over as he surveys it. All five soldiers are accounted for—they’re all sitting by a fire they set up beside the water, away from their tents and supplies.
Before he jumps, he takes a second to make sure the straps of his windglider are secure around his arms. The left side is good enough, but the right side is loose. He reaches with one arm to tighten it when he hears a familiar but faint twang of a bow string, and the whistle of an arrow.
Before Childe realizes what’s happening, he looks back down at the camp to see it burst into flames.
Suddenly, he’s driven by his instincts. It all happens so quickly. He fashions his water blades in record speed before jumping . . . over a broken wall next to him and into a secluded part of the ruin.
He holds his blades in front of him, but hesitates when he sees that the perpetrator is aiming her bow at him in return.
Childe hates that she caught him by surprise, but that truly is the Traveler’s calling card, isn’t it?
“What are you doing here?” her floating companion asks, her arms crossed over her tiny body. She looks more annoyed than afraid.
Childe takes in the sight of Lumine on her side, pulling the bowstring taught. There’s a lit lantern beside her full quiver. Her white dress has picked up quite a bit of the dirt on the ground, and seeing the clear shot she had of his soldiers' camp, he can tell quite quickly that she was playing at being a sniper.
“I could ask you the same thing, comrade.” He says this more to Lumine than Paimon. He doesn’t dare to break the Traveler’s gaze.
“She asked first,” Lumine says.
Below them, he can hear the commotion from the soldiers trying to put out the flames of their burning campsite. The very campsite that Lumine had set ablaze with her fiery arrow. At the moment, they don’t seem quite as important.
“I’m checking on my troops to see how they’re faring and if they’ve been making progress on their missions. It seems you’ve taken it into your own hands to hinder that progress.”
“Their missions are bothering nearby wildlife.”
“Who cares about the wildlife? They’re resilient enough, and who are some low-ranked soldiers to question the Tsaritsa’s orders?”
Lumine’s pull on her bowstring lessens, and the corner of her lip twitches. “A wealthy conservationist, that’s who. He was bothered by your troops’ operations and commissioned me to take out their camp.”
Childe tilts his head and chuckles. He lets his hold on his water blades fall, and their remains drip down his arm. He takes some of the water collecting in his hand and flings it at Lumine’s lantern. The flame extinguishes. Lumine scoffs at him.
He ignores that and moves closer to her. He kneels on the ground beside her and pulls out his own bow as she puts hers away. He can feel her watching him curiously, but she makes no effort to stop him.
Childe aims for his soldiers’ still-burning camp while they are at the shoreline collecting lake water. He pulls his bowstring, an arrow nocked between his two fingers, and uses his vision to call water to its tip. He lets the arrow go, holding together the water from afar so it doesn’t break off in the wind.
With a hiss, his arrow hits the flames, and the water from the tip extinguishes most of them. Granted, his aim was a bit off, and no matter how much training he does, his bow will never feel as natural in his hands as his own blades, but it gets the job done.
“So, what do you think?”
Lumine is sitting on her knees now, Paimon shaking her head at her shoulder.
“What I think is that my commission is done. We should be getting back to the Harbor.”
“Leaving so soon after I extinguished your work, comrade?” Childe stands up and offers Lumine his free hand. She refuses it and pushes herself up on her own. “It seems to me that you’re skipping out on finishing this! I’ve never thought you to be a quitter. ”
“I’m not quitting. ” She grabs her quiver on the ground and slings it over her shoulder. “You let the fire burn far too long, Childe. Their supplies are already damaged enough.”
She’s got him there. Lumine passes the lantern to Paimon, who needs two hands to hold it securely.
“I’ll see you Friday, then. Have fun dealing with that, ” Lumine teases as she and Paimon start to make their way out of the ruins.
“Wait!” Childe calls out.
Lumine watches him expectantly.
“How . . . I didn’t know you were proficient with a bow. Trying to get an edge on me?”
“My secrets don’t revolve around you, Childe.”
The sounds of his soldiers’ struggling campsite have gotten quieter—or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. He closes the gap between him and Lumine and Paimon in three long steps.
He can’t get that image of her aiming her arrow at him out of his head. How self-assured she was when she held it. The fletching of the arrow a hair’s length away from the curve of her jaw. The tensing of her muscles, the pull of her fingers, the form of someone so familiar with a weapon.
“Teach me.”
“What?”
Lumine crosses her arms over her chest. She doesn’t seem annoyed or afraid.
“Teach me how to use a bow like you do.”
#
“I’m not some personal trainer you can hire to teach you to get better at your own weapon!” Lumine shouts at Childe as she dodges a water blade he throws her way. They’ve snuck into the Golden House again for their weekly match.
“If that’s the case, maybe I need to pay the Adventurer’s Guild a visit!”
Lumine resists the urge to roll her eyes as she lunges for Childe with her sword. He parries her blow and fuses together his blades into a spear, and the sheer force of the action is almost enough to knock Lumine off her feet. She counters his next strikes with gusts of wind. He takes one, two, three steps back from the sheer force of it.
“As if they’d let you put out a commission! There has to be some sort of ban for you,” she taunts.
Her words are empty because she knows for a matter-of-fact that such a thing doesn’t exist. But if Childe felt even the slightest bit of hesitation from her, she knows that he’d abuse that privilege. Imagine the stupid commissions he’d send her on, just to waste her time! She can see it now—forced to join him for lunch at Liuli Pavilion for twenty thousand Mora! He’d even increase the pay to thirty thousand if she let him call it a date within public earshot.
The horror. The embarrassment. Oh, how’d she love to strangle him for it—
“Hey, girlie. Losing focus?”
“I’m sure you’d love that.”
In the midst of the fight, Childe grins at her.
He’s truly unlike anyone she’s ever fought before. Lumine remembers past sparring partners of hers—the most notable of which being her brother. She remembers his techniques and how they would move like extensions of each other. They’d catch each others’ swords with their own, like they were caught in some kind of dance.
Fighting with Childe never feels like dancing. He’s too focused on power and brute force for that. Together, they feel like two planets orbiting around each other, and every time one of them gets close, they pull the other in closer, just to let the momentum carry each other away again. He lives for the battle, but he never savors it.
But Lumine is starting to think that something doesn’t need to be savored to be enjoyed. Joy can be fleeting. There’s nothing wrong with that.
She grins back at him.
“Let’s make a deal,” he says.
“Try me.”
Childe takes out his bow and Lumine pushes herself back from him, anticipating his shots. He shoots five arrows at her, and she adeptly dodges each one. He’s quite slow and cumbersome with the weapon. His sixth arrow he takes in his hand, lets water coalesce around it, and throws it at her like a dart.
Lumine brings up her left arm from her side to cover her face, pulling from ground a growing wall of rock that acts as a shield. She’s never seen rock move so fast for her.
“If I win today, you’ll give me lessons. You’ll teach me how to use a bow like you.”
Because she knows the fight is almost always in her favor, Lumine says, “Deal.”
Before Childe has time to revel in his tiny victory, she runs towards him, using Anemo to enhance her steps so she feels close to flying. He has the water spear in his hands again, and when he thrusts it at her, she dodges it to the side and with a quick step, launches herself at him.
Lumine swings around to his back and wraps her free arm around his neck. She uses Geo to pull herself down with Childe on top of her. Her sword finds its way to his throat, just above her arm. If she moves it any closer, she’d draw blood.
“The problem with you, Childe,” she says, as he throws down his spear in a splash and tries to free himself from her embrace, “is that using a bow requires finesse that you lack. You need to be stealthy with it. It requires you to stay away from the fight and instead watch it from afar.”
She pulls her arms tighter as Childe tries to turn his head to see her face. She continues. “You’re too bloodthirsty. Too brutish. That’ll be your downfall. And that is why you’re going to yield.”
Childe chokes down a breath as Lumine very gently cuts into his throat. She’s careful with her blade. It’s barely a nick, and if he doesn’t have above-average blood volume, then he’ll live. But it’ll be a reminder that he lost to her yet again.
He rests his hand on Lumine’s sword, just above her own.
“I can be very delicate if I need to be.”
And with that, he wrenches the sword from her hand and throws her across the room.
Lumine hears the clang of her sword hitting the ground as she rolls herself over from the impact. Childe lunges toward her with a fresh water spear. Still on the ground, Lumine summons boulders—they’re small and crumbling apart when they come into being, but it’s the best she can do under this type of pressure—and shoves them at Childe. He counters each with his blade and Lumine internally groans at how easily water beats stone.
It’s him on top of her again, but now he’s the one pressing the blade against her throat. He uses his free hand to wipe away the drops of blood from his neck before they fall on her. Lumine thinks he looks absolutely insane. There’s something sparkling in his eyes—the closest he’ll ever get to having light in them.
“Am I being bloodthirsty enough?” he asks her. “You’re the one who nicked me, after all.”
Before Lumine can roll away, Childe takes his now-bloodied free hand and pins her arm down.
He could kill her right now. Her life is in his hands. Yet he doesn’t because he still sees some kind of use for her.
Feeling the cold of the spear’s blade at her throat, touching but not cutting, Lumine sighs. “I yield.”
Childe is absolutely jubilant. But he’s also exhausted. At her words, he lets his blade drop and falls to Lumine’s side so they’re laying down together, almost touching. They’re breathing hard. Lumine can feel her heart threatening to break out of her chest.
They lay like that for a while. This isn’t anything new to them, but it’s certainly strange for enemies to trust each other like this. Because yes, lying next to each other, vulnerable, must be some form of trust between them. Yet it’s always some sort of unspoken agreement to the two of them.
Childe is a killer, but he won’t kill her.
Lumine is a warrior, but she won’t hurt him.
At least, not for now.
They look over at each other at the same time, which would make Lumine giggle if it were anyone but him.
“So, are you free on Wednesday?”
She rolls her eyes. Instead of answering him, she reaches into her dress pockets, ignoring the bruises that she knows are forming, and pulls out a compact towel. She hands it to him.
“For your wound.”
He takes it and holds it to his throat. When he pulls it away, he’s surprised at how concentrated the blood on it is. He shows it to her.
“Not a bad sacrifice for some lessons with you, girlie. Don’t ya think? Maybe for our first one, you can teach me how to do damage like this.”
Lumine sighs, hiding her smile.
“Like I’d let a Harbinger know my secrets.”
#
On the morning of their first lesson, Childe meets Lumine at the Adventurer’s Guild counter.
He ends up arriving a few minutes earlier than her, which was all fine and dandy. Perfectly acceptable . . . Well, maybe he was wrong to think that the esteemed Traveler would have a sense of punctuality. It makes perfect sense—she was late to arrive in Liyue, making her a suspect in Rex Lapis’s murder. She was also late to the Exuvia and, subsequently, the Gnosis.
He was too, but he’ll leave that part out.
Childe spends the moments of Lumine’s absence being watched by the Guild's Branch Master. He can’t remember her name for the life of him, but something tells him that she’d glare at him even if he did.
Her gaze is quite uncomfortable, so Childe has never been happier to see Lumine when she finally arrives at his side.
“Hoping you could show me up?” he teases over her shoulder as she approaches the receptionist at the counter.
Lumine scoffs. “More like Paimon had many objections about me being alone with you.”
He has nothing to say to that.
When Childe hears the receptionist read out the payment for each commission, he holds back from mentioning anything until they’re both out of earshot and walking through the city.
“Only six thousand Mora per commission? Girlie, you know you wouldn’t have to take on so many today if you let me pay you for this lesson.”
Lumine groans and ignores him for most of the walk.
Her first commission is to take out a hilichurl camp a little away from the harbor. Lumine says that it’s close to where she wanted to take him for this lesson, so it’s convenient that they’re near each other.
They take the north road, and as they pass under the enormous stone arch of a mountain, they take a right until they’re in a clearing, the cliffs facing the ocean a bit past them. When Childe spots the hilichurl camp, he fashions his blades, itching to take them, when Lumine places her arm against her chest, reining him in.
“You’re not going near them.”
“C’mon, girlie. It’d take me a minute tops to get through them. With you alongside me, we could even cut that time in half.”
“No.” Lumine kneels and reaches into a satchel at her hip and pulls out a box of matches. She’s carrying quite a bit today—her sword, bow, and quiver are all strapped to her body. She only let him carry three thin, wooden targets, probably hoping he got a splinter or two. “I don’t need you doing my work for me.”
Childe kneels alongside her and watches as she strikes the match against the box and lights a pile of leaves. The flame catches quickly, the smoke trail dancing delicately in the light breeze.
“Consider this the beginning of the lesson.” With that, Lumine pulls her bow from her back and nocks an arrow in between her fingers. When the bowstring is taught, she puts the point of the arrow in the fire and lets it engulf it. She aims carefully at one of the hilichurl towers and releases the arrow.
When the first arrow catches in the wood, the fire spreads quickly. Lumine wastes no time. She fires another arrow at the tower, and two more at the second tower. Within a minute, both towers are crumbling, and the hilichurls are scrambling.
“So that’s how you took down my Fatui camps. I must admit, it’s innovative,” Childe says when Lumine puts away her bow. “I should suggest fireproofing our supplies to the Tsaritsa.”
Lumine stomps the dying flame out with her foot. “You won’t do that.”
She’s right; he won’t. Especially if it means he’d catch Lumine during her commissions less often.
They pass the hilichurl camp, and from afar, Childe can admit that her method was . . . better. Quicker. Less bloodier. But it still doesn’t make sense to him. Sure, he understands being hesitant to kill other people, especially the defenseless, but sparing the hilichurls? They’re nothing more than beasts of the wilderness. Lumine’s hesitancy to harm them herself is perplexing for a warrior like her.
Lumine takes him past a small pool with an overlooking tree to a narrow strip of land with a few rocks surrounding it. He takes in the view of Liyue from here. It’s quite the panorama: Yaoguang Shoal, Guyun Stone Forest, the harbor, and even Dragonspine in Mondstadt.
“Can you bring me the targets?” Lumine calls out to him from one of the tallest rocks.
He walks over and pulls them from the sling on his back. Lumine takes one and puts it under her arm. With her free hand against the stone, she closes her eyes in concentration and Childe watches in awe as the hard rock becomes almost pliable under her hand. She takes the target under her arm and pushes it against the rock so it’s flush and set within it. She repeats the process for the other two targets.
Childe runs his fingers against the now-solid stone as Lumine unloads her weapons on the ground behind him. “How’d you do this?”
“You aren’t the only one with skills you want to practice,” comes her cryptic answer. “Get over here—unless you want to be the target?”
Childe pulls out his own bow as he approaches her and reaches for an arrow from her quiver. She swats his hand away.
“I want you to use my bow first.”
“You’re giving me your own weapon, girlie? You must really trust me.”
Lumine scoffs. “I know the feeling of my bow, so I know how to help you handle it best to help you improve.”
“I know the feeling of my bow too.”
“A true warrior should be accustomed to using any weapon, especially the faulty ones.”
She holds her bow out to him, and he takes it reluctantly.
She’s right. It’s kind of dingy. Come to think of it, her sword isn’t anything special, either. It makes her battle prowess even more remarkable.
“Okay, give me five good shots at each of the targets,” Lumine instructs him. “That should be enough for me to figure out what you’re doing wrong.”
Childe smirks at her attempt to egg him on. “Watch and learn, girlie.”
Even he knows that such a stupid thing to say, given that he was the one who begged her for lessons. But hearing her let out an exasperated sigh beside him makes it worth it.
As he nocks back the first arrow of fifteen, he takes in how the bow feels in his hands. The string is taught against his fingers, and when he pulls back, he remembers how Lumine looks when she does the same motion, and how the string that was so close to her face is now close to his. He takes a deep breath, centers himself, and lets the arrow fly.
The unfamiliar bow doesn’t change much about his performance. The arrows still feel heavy and cumbersome between his fingers. Part of him feels uncharacteristically angry at himself for how unnatural this is. Or maybe this is embarrassment. He’s never felt embarrassed in front of Lumine before.
In just under twenty seconds, Childe has fifteen arrows lodged in the three targets combined. Three are in the center, and the rest are just slightly off.
He turns to Lumine, who’s observing the targets curiously.
“What do you think?”
Instead of answering right away, Lumine moves behind him and rests her hands on his. She guides the bow upward and takes one hand away to pull out an arrow. Childe has never been so thankful that she can’t see his face, because he knows for sure that it’s heating up.
Lumine is quite shorter than him, but it doesn’t make the whole thing as awkward as it should be. Hand back on his, she lets the arrow pass over her fingers and into his. She adjusts his aim, then adjusts his fingers.
“It’s easier to use three,” she says. “It helps keep your arrow straight, and your aim will be more consistent.”
“Thanks, girlie.”
She tilts her head and takes him in. “Try now.”
She’s right. This time, ten of his fifteen arrows hit the center of the targets. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement.
When Childe turns to look at Lumine, she gives him a nod. “Not bad for a rookie.”
The comment makes him smile, a genuine one. The edge of Lumine’s lip twitches, and she almost grins before she gets herself under control again.
“Let’s run that again, okay?”
For the next hour, Lumine gives Childe improvements and he shoots arrows at the target until they blur together. After the last set, Lumine takes the bow from him and puts it back on her back. He helps her gather the rest of her supplies, but they keep the targets embedded in the rocks.
They walk back slowly to the main road.
“How’d I do, teacher? D’you think I’m hopeless?” he asks her.
“I think you have potential, dear student. You did good today.”
“You too, you know,” he says, trying to ignore the implication of Lumine giving him a compliment. “You’re obviously very skilled with the bow, even more so than me.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m curious why you don’t use it that often.”
Lumine messes with the satchel at her waist, unbuttoning and buttoning it as she thinks. “My brother always preferred using a sword. So it’s just a force of habit, I suppose.”
Ah. The brother.
“I’m sorry,” Childe says, apologizing like her brother is already dead.
“I don’t need pity from you, Childe. Like I said, force of habit . . . You know, you remind me of him.”
“Benevolent?”
Lumine laughs—it’s short and subdued, but it’s a laugh nonetheless. “ Foolhardy. ”
Childe has to laugh at that too—because she’s not wrong, because battle requires a bit of recklessness. “Point taken.”
They’ve reached the main road now, and when it comes time to part, Childe adjusts his bow on his back and ruffles his hair. When he looks up, he catches Lumine watching him with an unreadable look on her face.
“I have a few more commissions to get through,” she says, keeping his gaze. “I’ll see you next week?”
“See you later, girlie.”
And with that, Lumine scoffs and continues to follow the trail north. Childe stands there until he can’t see her anymore, and it’s only then when he gathers the courage to walk through Liyue Harbor alone once again.