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Childe grinned in the midst of the fray and Lumine watched, horrified, as electricity buzzed around him.
He didn't have his Vision.
She'd seen Diluc's hands once, thin strips of burn-warped flesh peeking out between his gloves and sleeves. Gray hairs studded a mane that should stay red for decades more. Sometimes he just threw up, his fire-torn stomach reliving the days when his Delusion fed on his organs to fuel its wrath.
Lumine cut a path forward, automata metal shearing beneath her blade, but it didn’t matter. Childe laughed and swung his arm in an arc, lightning striking wherever his index finger fell, until–
His cocky grin froze. His eyes widened as static built, condensing around him rather than discharging where he willed. He cringed back, away, but he wasn’t faster than lightning. The building charge let out a high-pitched whine and he met the lightning lance with an open stare and open arms.
“CHILDE!”
Sometimes when thunder struck, it sounded as if the sky was being torn apart. This wasn’t that. This was an animal, living screech that left ears ringing, bleeding, scraping inside her teeth and stabbing in her skull. The light that followed burned Childe's cowering silhouette into her vision. Lumine dug her sword into the ground to brace against the blast, machinery bouncing against the tile, and blinked away the afterimages.
Childe didn’t make a sound. She coughed in the dust cloud – tried to ignore the smell of burnt hair, burning flesh – and tore after the blood trail he left the moment she caught sight of it.
Childe ran.
He was hurt. He ran just like he did as a child fleeing from the things in the woods, then again from the things in the dark. He ran through the twisting, golden, mechanical halls with his hand clutched thoughtlessly to his left eye.
There was a terrible dread, a certainty in his injury. The moment he stopped running, he would die. If he could just keep running–
He skidded around a corner and overbalanced, his nerves quite literally fried, and hit the ground shoulder-first with a strangled wheeze. The sound of his own heartbeat drowned out his thoughts, not that he had any more intelligent than get away.
As if to answer his panicked prayers, his remaining eye fell upon a crevice, a service closet – it didn’t matter what it was. It was tight and dark and full of boxes he could crawl behind. Childe backed into it, kicking his way deeper like a dog finding a good hole to die in.
That's what this was, wasn't it? Snezhnaya's war dog finding a good place to die.
Maybe he'd get better. Maybe his Delusion would save him? He just had to rest, yes. He'd been hurt before, worse even!
(He was a terrible liar.)
Childe let his head thunk against the wall behind him and unclenched his other fist. He couldn't take the one away from his eye; he didn't know what'd come with it. His Delusion grinned back at him, sitting pretty on the palm of his hand like it hadn't just savaged him, like it wasn't glittering behind a film of his blood.
He took a shuddering gasp and tried to wheeze quieter, praying nothing would find him before he could recover. He would recover, so long as he was left alone. It didn't matter that his hands and feet had gone cold or that his insides burned like fire, that he could feel his body squeezing the blood away from the nonvital. He coughed once and something dribbled out the corner of his mouth.
He couldn't hear very well. Everything was both too sharp, too clear, the stark outline of adrenaline, but hazy at the edges now that his blood had a moment to pool. Sleep crept closer but then, through the blanket of death closing in, he heard his name.
"CHILDE!"
It was her, surely to finish the job and mercy kill him. She wouldn't know that he clung to life harder than death tore him away. He was stronger than it. He had to be. He promised his parents he'd look after them when they were old. He promised Teucer he'd come home.
"CHILDE! Where are you?!"
She was getting closer. He burrowed deeper into his crawlspace.
"Childe, please," she cried.
She sounded like an angel when she sang. He'd followed her once, when she was having a bad day, and listened to her haunting, sad song. Now she sounded like the grave.
The cold bit harder, and with the numbness came True Dread.
He was dying.
Childe sobbed once. He couldn't help it, but it doomed him further as Lumine blocked the hall light. The shadow of the reaper fell on him.
"Childe! There you are!"
He shook his head and kicked himself deeper, adrenaline surging back through his ruined body and giving him relief from the blur creeping into the edges of reality. His heart pumped his life away harder.
Lumine approached, backlit by the hall light that blazed in her hair like a halo. "Oh my God, come here."
Her hand approached him. He had the primal urge to bite, to Get Away, but she was more stubborn than his teeth. There were hands on his arm, his shoulder, snatched away and knotted in his hair when he tried to wrench away.
They dragged him out into the bright hall, light overwhelming his vision, and then he was pillowed in golden hair that filled his nose with the smell of ozone even over the tang of metal in his mouth.
Distantly, he heard her babbling.
"Hang on. I've got you, buddy. I'm gonna take you to a doctor. Just hold on for me, okay? I've got you. I–"
The next eternity was spent clinging to her and to life.
When Lumine didn't hurt him further, he latched onto her like the liferaft she was. The company was nice if he had to die, but he decided that he simply wouldn’t. In a blur he was thrown over the angel’s shoulder and whisked away. He stared unseeing at the white of her dress, steadily speckled red as he dripped on it, bouncing with each step as her heels kicked out behind her.
He was cold, but she was warm.
Childe counted each time her boots clacked on the floor. He bit the inside of his cheek until it bled, anything he could to stave off his end. He knew what it felt like to slip away, to sleep with the fear of not waking up. He often paced for days at a time in whatever room the Fatui set him up in, dreading the floaty, falling feeling only to jerk awake just as he tipped over the edge into slumber. The void, the Abyss, death, sleep, they were all the same.
His vision fuzzed in time with his feeble heartbeat and Childe took a fistful of fabric to ground himself. Lumine murmured something unintelligible and he sighed, letting his eye slip shut for just a moment. He never told anyone, but he’d always been terrified of the dark. He never grew out of it. It didn’t matter that he had risen to be the worst, scariest thing in its depths – he was afraid of the dark itself.
How wonderful, then, to be carried in the embrace of the stars. Lumine was a comforting warmth under his stomach to match the one dripping through his fingers. It gave him the strength to curl in the deepest corner of his consciousness like a stray cat backed into a wall, hissing at the call of the afterlife.
It'd have to take him by force.
And by force he was eventually put down, overpowered into a hospital bed while grim-faced strangers pried his hand away from his face, Lumine holding both of his arms in hers and whispering sweet nothings into his ear.
Lumine grabbed Childe’s wrists and held them tight while he bucked and kicked at her friends. He seemed to be trying to scream, but the Delusion backfire had shredded his voice to rattling whines. He was strong, too strong for them to get a good look at what was left of his eye or staunch the bleeding, but she shuddered at his weak attempts to get away.
He ripped one arm free and swung it at the nearest medic, his fingers curled around the hilt of a sword that wasn’t there. Lumine grabbed him before he could hurt himself worse and pressed her forehead to his. He struggled and she bore down, pinning him into the mattress, bending him until he creaked and his voice gave out.
“Childe,” she ordered. She repeated his name until his good eye rolled to meet hers, wide and terrified, and she squeezed his hands.
"It's gonna be okay," she crooned. The panic bled away as he really looked at her, recognition dawning in the dull blue. Lumine pressed a kiss to his forehead and he relaxed, his fingers now knotted in the fabric of her gauntlets, holding her tight rather than clawing free. "I’ve got you."
She held both his hands in hers – holding, not pinning – and shuffled to the side to give the doctors access. His good eye followed her, his pupil blown so wide it only left a thin ring of his iris. “I got you. Just hold on, okay?”
He managed the first part of a nod, too weak to raise his head to finish it, but that’s all she needed. Lumine knelt next to his head and petted his hair while her friends swarmed around: raising his legs, stripping him of the clothing matting his wounds, putting pressure on the worst of them and flushing his eye clean of its gore. It had to hurt, but he was too far gone to feel.
Lumine stayed by his side until he was stable. She stayed as he finally succumbed to exhaustion, one hand reaching out in a silent plea that she happily obliged. She cradled his head in her arms and kissed him again, suppressing a shiver at the lingering taste of blood, then rose to kiss the fresh gauze over his missing eye. She kissed the bridge of his nose, his forehead, and then finally bid him rest with a gentle press to his eyelid. She held him while he clung to her, and she kept holding him as he finally surrendered to sleep.
And when he woke up, she was still there.