Work Text:
“Mr. Childe, this is the last of the boxes you’ve told us to pack away. Do you need anything else?”
Childe waves a weak hand towards the worker — a good old man named Harry who’s been working for him and his family for the past 15 years — and proceeds to walk towards the now empty bedroom, whose walls were painted half white and powder blue: a result of something they never got to finish.
Their fallout had been Childe’s fault.
All of it.
As he pads to the center of the room he wonders in bitter amusement just how Zhongli was able to put up with him for 5 years, even with his countless episodes and days of incinerating hostility, where he’d lock himself in a cage and float through nothingness, losing sight of everything, even at the pair of warm and familiar hands that had always been right before him to give him a home to return to.
(And Childe admits that he never had that — a home . His life was just as cold and ruthless like Snezhnaya in its all year round winter glory; cold. Gray. Dull. Perhaps that’s why he’s so accustomed to loneliness.)
But as far as everything goes, Childe is Childe. He will always be just Childe. And because he knows better than anyone that he’s better off alone, he decides that Zhongli could do better than him. He should do better than this. If he were to stay with him, there would always be a wall standing between them that will only hurt Zhongli, because even with trust he will always be afraid— of showing weakness, of having a spare moment of vulnerability, and ultimately, being known. Seen.
They are all small things that lead up to what Childe is as a whole: broken, lonely. Afraid.
He sighs and looks around the room again. Like he hasn’t been doing that for the past week, after Hu Tao cleared all of Zhongli’s things out. The paint had long since dried out, warming down to a less vibrant white, and the room doesn’t smell like fresh paint and Zhongli’s potted wild glazed lilies anymore. A small part of Childe aches for what he once had — Zhongli, his flowers, his afternoon tea, his admittedly amazing rock and jade collection — something that is now all but reduced to a thing of the past, hidden on the darkest crevice of his brain, and, admittedly , the best damn thing that’s ever happened to him in this dark and miserable life of his.
Liyue was supposed to be a city of new beginnings, they said. But why did it only leave him with half a heart turned into dust, aching so loudly for someone’s hand he himself has let go of?
He stops at the corner of the room where Zhongli’s table used to sit and slides down the wall to a crouch. All of his belongings were gone, like everything else, yet the whole vicinity still distinctly felt like him, smelled like him, and it only continuously served as a grim reminder to Childe that, yeah .
You did this to yourself.