Chapter Text
He often wondered if his redeemable qualities actually redeemed him or if they just made sure he could sleep at night. He liked to think himself a decent person but then he’d recall his flaws and actions that he still hadn’t technically atoned for. And, truthfully, he didn’t plan on repenting any time soon either. So, to remind himself of the goodness he liked to believe was still inside of him, he listed off some of his good attributes.
Hard working and diligent, fun and charming, and he had a welcoming and friendly disposition. He wasn’t unattractive, either, though some might disagree when on the topic of his hair (a misfortune but he made do with what he was given.)
His flaws? Possibly too out there and maybe a touch too flirtatious, but those could be overlooked (hopefully). Some might say he had completely thrown his morals out the window, but that was just completely untrue . He had morals, just not ones that a typical law abiding citizen would follow. He did care a great deal about his family, and he believed in hard work as well as women's rights, thank you very much.
Maybe his biggest flaw was his cooking. No, his flaw wasn’t that he couldn’t cook well, it was that he didn’t try. Maybe he should. But that took effort and after a long, tiring day of work he often couldn’t muster up the motivation to move to the kitchen and start banging around.
So much for hard work.
And the desire to go out and buy a microwave dinner increased tenfold when half of your never used cooking supplies sat in cardboard boxes in the corner of your new apartment. Slightly dented cardboard boxes dumped by a nice oriental couch that didn’t match with anything else, most likely because it was stolen.
It was when he was sitting in between two such cardboard boxes searching for his wallet did he hear the doorbell ring.
Surprised, he looked up from the container of silverware he had pried open. He wondered who it could be, considering he had only just gotten here today. Maybe a work associate who had been waiting to finally talk to him in person?
He went to his door, casting a glance behind him to the mess in his living room, still visible from the spot by the door. He sighed. Whoever his visitor was, hopefully they wouldn’t be too disgusted by the pigsty behind him. Or better yet, maybe they wouldn’t look too hard in that direction.
He glanced through the peephole, and he instantly knew he didn’t recognize who the person was. It was a woman, blue hair being one of the first things that jumped out at him.
He considered his options before finally opening the door. He figured the stranger couldn’t really be a threat. After all, a gun sat on the couch behind him right now, and though it wouldn’t be visible from where the two were standing, he could run back to grab it if necessary. And when the door was open all the way, it proved his suspicions; he was much taller than the newcomer, so he could most likely overpower her.
“Hello.”
She did indeed have blue hair, filled with waves, borderline curly, and it fell over one shoulder. Light makeup outlined her eyelashes, drawing out her pale lavender eyes, though they still seemed half lidded from lack of sleep. She wore a neat blouse and straight skirt, an outfit suitable for a formal workplace.
“Hello,” Childe returned the greeting, leaning against his door frame to observe her further. She was certainly pretty, but by observing he meant assessing any threats. Bombs, knives, hidden darts of poison, all things he had experienced, though he hadn’t ever dealt with them standing in front of his house. His eyes locked onto the basket she held in her hands, attempting to identify each object.
“You just moved here?” she asked.
His eyes snapped up from the basket and he looked at her when he spoke next.
“Yes,” Childe answered.
She smiled, not ingenuine but the tiredness didn’t vanish from her eyes.
“I’m Ganyu.” She held out the basket to him. “We’re neighbors now. I brought you some food.”
For her sake he tried not to let his suspicion show. Maybe he would check the bag inside his house when the door was shut to not let her get offended. After all, it wasn’t personal. He would follow the same procedure from any package he ever received.
“Thank you.” He moved the handle of the basket to his elbow and shot Ganyu a smile. “That’s so kind of you to think of me. I guess we’ll be seeing each other now and then, now that we live next to each other. Which apartment did you say was yours?”
Ganyu pointed up, pulling her hand out the grip she had been holding it in.
“The penthouse.”
Childe whistled. She must be rich. Not that he was thinking about stealing from her. Well, he had thought about it, but he wasn’t seriously considering it.
He noticed as they were standing there she really did look tired. He wondered if she had gotten good sleep last night.
“Thanks for dropping by,” he said, indicating that she was free to leave now. She didn’t seem to be thrilled to be standing on his doorstep, looking more anxious than anything else. He didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable by forcing her to stay any longer, so he dismissed her with a gentler smile. “Maybe I’ll catch you another time, huh?”
She nodded and turned.
“If you ever need anything, feel free to ask me about it.” She paused as her foot took the first step. “Though… I have work during most of the day, so you can probably only catch me during the evenings or on the weekends.”
Childe nodded understandingly. He had a constantly changing work schedule that often got a bit crazy. He understood what it was like to work unusual or long hours.
As she was halfway up the steps, nearly out of sight, he called out after her.
“My name’s Childe, by the way!” He realized he hadn’t even told her that. Then he realized she hadn’t even asked in the first place.
She hadn’t said no to seeing each other again, though.
He shut the door and locked it behind himself.
He tore into the food after Ganyu had left, examining it for anything such as bombs or hidden cameras, but hadn’t found anything coating the basket of fruits and loaf of bread. He didn’t actually eat anything from it, though. As well as not being motivated to make his own dinner, he wasn’t motivated to do any quick tests to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.
He ended up with a microwave dinner he found in his fridge and he forgot about the housewarming gift in his kitchen until the morning.
When he stumbled over it again he decided to risk eating some of it. He was hungry and he hadn’t packed much food. It had been a long trip from Snezhaya to Liyue so obviously he hadn’t packed a ton of anything for himself. Though, now he wished he had. He already missed his homeland, a place he only visited occasionally, so frequently moving from one nation to the next for work. And now he would be situated in Liyue for a year or two, if all went according to plan.
He couldn’t find a bread knife in his moving boxes (possibly because he didn’t have one. He had a multitude of cooking supplies though he hardly ever used any of them. If he did ever own a bread knife he didn’t know where it was now.) So instead of the preferred serrated bread knife he used a dagger he found lying on the kitchen counter.
He took a bite of his slice of bread unaware, completely unexpecting the flavor. His first reaction was that he wanted to spit it out and wash his mouth out with strong whiskey and then throw the loaf into the trash. It was supposed to be pumpkin he thought, but it tasted like dry wheat mixed with a gallon of cinnamon baked into a brick. The bread was thick and heavy and the flavor was atrocious, making him want to gag with the overwhelming taste.
Childe thought he was bad enough for not trying to cook. He quickly found out that that was not the worst sin a person could commit in the kitchen.
But despite his horrified reaction, after finally swallowing he burst into laughter.
“What recipe was that ?” he chortled, though no one was there to hear it.
“Hey!”
She turned and he ran to catch up with her. He locked his car with his car keys, speeding up then slowing down when he was beside her.
What a coincidence. They had seemed to get back from whatever work they had been doing at the same time and now they headed into the building together.
“I tried your bread!” Childe told her as they walked. His mind was blanking with her eyes intently on him, her whole and undivided attention with him. “It was really great! Was it homemade?”
Another flaw of his: lying came naturally. Although others might find that technically a gift. And then in that case, Childe would take it, anything that could boost his list of accomplishments.
“It was homemade, actually,” she answered, her voice quiet and almost shy.
Yes, lying was a gift. Because it was beautiful to see that small smile come to her lips, natural and unforced. It was unlike the one that had come last night, when she had clearly only wanted to be hospitable and welcoming and not interested in interacting. But now there was a glimmer in her eyes, the first change of sleep to alertness.
“I loved it! I’ll have to get a recipe some time!”
“Really?” She didn’t try to hide any of her surprise as she stopped fully in her tracks just so she could face him. “Because no one ever likes my baking.”
“Hmm, that’s odd.” He searched for words. He had found a hook, a gateway into a conversation she was on board with. But how to continue without completely lying he didn’t know. “Well, your baking’s certainly unique. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it!”
Ganyu hummed, fidgeting with her fingers, steepling them and folding them together.
“Thank you. The recipe is actually my godmother’s. The only difference is I replaced some of the ingredients for healthier substitutes!”
Maybe that explained it. Or maybe not. He wasn’t a baker guy, maybe changing the ingredients did nothing at all. All he knew was that Ganyu or her godmother had seriously screwed up taste buds.
“Maybe we could try baking together.” The suggestion popped up out of nowhere and when the words came out he didn’t know if he wanted to take them back or not. They certainly weren’t practical or sensical, but maybe it was a good idea. (No, good archons. No. It was not a good idea, what was he thinking?)
Her eyes lit up even further. She nodded.
“That sounds… pleasant.”
“You absolute moron.”
Her glass of white wine glowed gold, matching the color of her slanted and disapproving eyes. She twirled the drink around, the beverage spinning slowly and reflecting the lights of the restaurant above in rotating discs and diamonds.
He takes her out to a nice dinner, plans on paying for everything, and how does he get repaid? Being told he’s a moron. He’s hardly even said anything yet, and she thinks she’s got him read like an open book. How very Lumine of her.
“Moron? Hardly. I don’t see what’s wrong with befriending a neighbor. It’s good to have comrades wherever you are.”
She shook her head, tipping her glass back again to take a sip. She then picked up her fork and spun it around in her pasta, playing with the strands of linguine.
“You’re blind.”
“Tell me what I’m missing, oh enlightened one,” Childe joked, displeased with her withering disapproval and unbacked insults.
“You’re falling for her, aren’t you?”
He spluttered, chuckling loudly but feeling a warmth creep up on him unexpectedly.
“Lumine, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not. This happens too often, you know.” She pointed her fork at him, her gaze suddenly softening. If he didn’t know better he would say her expression was sympathetic (which he would hate.) “You fall in love too quickly.”
“You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.” Offended, he took a sip of his own drink and searched for a way to ease out of this conversation. He hardly even knew how they had wound up in this situation. They were chatting about his move, her questioning him about how it was going and then she was interrogating him, trying to decipher a second meaning behind every word.
“I know you better than you think,” she said. Lumine took a bite of her pasta and shook her head slowly. Her shoulders relaxed, though, and it seemed she was letting him off the hook.
“Just don’t be stupid.”
As much as he was grateful for the escape she was providing him he was curious by what her words meant.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he inquired.
Lumine shrugged.
“You steal hearts without realizing it but in the end it’s yours getting broken.”
He tried to mull over her words, her explanation only serving to confuse him even more. But to ask even more questions might lead to more uncomfortable topics. So he let it drop, and eventually the light-hearted mood returned to their dinner table for two.
As it turned out, neither of them knew how to cook properly. Because even though Childe was inexperienced in the area of the kitchen, even he could tell these were not usual ingredients. He doubted gourmet chefs used fake sugar and lettuce when making cookies, that’s all he was going to say.
“It’s not lettuce, it’s spinach,” Ganyu corrected. She was facing the blender, dark green swirling around at the bottom. “And it’s nutritious and filled with lots of fiber! It can even reduce chances of getting cancer.”
Childe nodded thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”
Oh, celestia above, this was turning into a disaster. Ganyu wanted to share these cookies with her coworkers tomorrow. Childe couldn’t let her do that, for her sake and the sake of her victims.
The dough was overly liquidy for some reason. Childe examined the recipe on his phone, squinting at the screen and debating what to do. Maybe add flour?
Ganyu squeaked as Childe turned on the blender with the batter and newly added flour. White clouds puffed up, covering the front of Childe and Ganyu’s shirts and aprons. There was a moment of silence as Childe observed the now completely powdered countertop, embarrassed and fully expecting annoyance from his co-chef. He almost did a double take when he heard Ganyu giggle, and he turned towards her disbelievingly, wiping a sleeve across his face.
“You can’t turn the blender on when there’s too much flour all piled up on the bottom of the bowl!” she scolded him.
She pushed him to the side, taking a plastic spatula to the mess, scraping the sides to dump the batter back into the middle.
After the batter was (somewhat) fixed, they took to rolling the dough into balls, dropping them onto the cookie sheet. Childe’s hands got messy quickly, his palms and fingers turning a dark brown, some kind of pigment from the spinach mixing with the dark cocoa powder and creating a disastrous result.
Then they were sliding them into the oven with her rose shaped timer set for twenty minutes. When Ganyu wasn’t looking, Childe turned the timer off and then they went into the living room with glasses of wine and talked.
Her living room was much more refined when compared to his. When he sat down on the couch, he immediately sank into it, and all the lamps cast warm light across the white furniture and rugs.
Talking was so nice. Admittedly, he didn’t often have regular conversations with regular people, and he worried he might be getting rusty at it, if that was really a way to describe it.
But despite his fears, it was easy and comfortable. He stayed out of restricted topics, steering the conversation back around to her, and, when that didn’t work, talking about his family and Shneznaya. Ganyu also seemed to be less experienced in casual gossip, surprised at the attentive questions he kept asking about her personal life.
“My favorite song? I don’t know, I never really thought about it before.”
He made a mental note of that.
“Yes, my entire living room is white. I wouldn’t really say that’s my favorite color, though. Hm? Oh, no, not blue. If I had to choose… I’d probably say red.”
Another mental note. He wondered how many other people knew her favorite color was red.
“Do you smell something burning?”
Childe tried to look surprised when they were presented with charred black lumps sitting in the oven. Ganyu looked so disappointed though that Childe quickly offered to buy some at the store right then.
Ganyu was skeptical at first, but finally Childe persuaded her otherwise. She insisted upon buying them herself so she could choose which type (buy the healthiest version, no doubt) and Childe agreed, handing over spare money in his pockets.
“We’ll have to do this at my place next time, huh?” Childe suggested. He was nervous, anticipating her rejection but pleasantly surprised when she shone him one of her eternally subdued smiles and agreed.
“Sounds fun. Hopefully your egg timer isn’t broken or anything.”
Childe laughed and secretly he thought egg timers were old fashioned. After all, you could easily pull up a timer on your phone. But he secretly thought it was cute as well.
“I’ll see you tomorrow!” were her words as he left and she shut the door behind him. She sounded genuinely happy about it, as if seeing each other nearly everyday because they lived right next door to each other was something amazingly great. He liked that.
“I don’t get why they have to add so much sugar and other carbohydrates,” Ganyu wondered aloud, wrinkling her nose in disgust. She leaned against the counter beside Childe, their bodies pressed next to each other so they could both watch the small screen of Childe’s phone.
Ganyu was clearly displeased by the recipe used in the cooking video, surprised at the ingredients that the chef used as if they were the ones using unusual foods.
“Don’t they worry that they’ll grow…” she suddenly trailed off, embarrassed to finish her sentence. “Obese?”
Childe chuckled, warmed by her flusteredness. He exited out of the tab, getting rid of the video since they probably wouldn’t be able to substitute their way out of that one. As they both straightened up, stretching their backs, Ganyu distractedly pulled a hand through her hair.
“You know, we could watch something else,” Childe suggested.
“Hmm? Like what?” Her hand paused in her path through her hair, yet again her attention fully on him. Now it felt as if the tables were being turned, him being the one flustered, though for a different reason than she had been.
“I don’t know, like a movie?”
When she smiled he had to smile back.
“That sounds nice.”
“You have a girlfriend?”
The first words she decided she wanted to start the zoom meeting with were those. How obnoxious, but to be expected.
“And who told you that?”
“It’s a yes or no question.”
“Answer mine first.”
Signora shrugged, indifference painting her features. She didn’t actually care about Childe’s romantic life, that much was obvious; the only reason she wanted to know was so she could hold something above his head.
“Through the grapevine,” Signora answered vaguely.
“Right, and like I’d tell you.”
“Can we get this meeting started?” Dottore asked, not concerned with a lower-down’s love life. Childe was thankful for the unintentional escape provided and he nodded quickly.
“Lovely,” Dottore said.
“How’s your stay in Liyue been so far?”
“Signora, let’s get onto business.”
“Alright. Fine.”