Chapter Text
It’s still dark when you wake up. The alarm on your phone rings out, but you stay under the covers and let it play for a while, as you are waiting to wake up enough for the day ahead. Your alarm is meant to do that, as you have had problems getting up in the past, and have it set earlier to let you get that extra ten minutes in the warmth of the bed. Eventually, you stand up and walk into the main room of your apartment. You make some toast, slather honey on it, and eat it on the couch. The news is talking about a case of someone getting away with the murder of a vision-bearer because they don’t leave behind bodies before you switch it to the show you’ve been watching recently. You watch it as you get ready, leaving it playing as you walk out of the room and do the jobs you need to do. You leave for work halfway through the episode.
You step inside Wangshu Coffee, the shop having already being unlocked presumably by Miss Goldet, your boss, your only coworker and friend, Aether. You got ready, and at 7:30, you flipped the open sign and went back behind the counter.
By the time 8 o’clock rolled around, you were thoroughly bored, as anyone would be after a day with no customers.
“Is the guy you’re falling for gonna show up today?” Aether asked, surprising you.
“Hey – wait – no, I’m not in love with him!” You don’t know where that came from. You aren’t in love with the guy who shows up around this time, at least you don’t think.
“You knew who I was talking about, though. Do you even know his name?” Aether smirked, knowing the answer. He leaned on the countertop, staring out of the glass windows at the entrance to the shop.
“Well, no. But who else shows up at this time regularly?”
“I guess. You need to get his name the next time he shows up. We can’t just keep calling him ‘the guy.’ The shop’s empty right now. It wouldn’t be too weird to have a chat with him.”
“If you’ll stop bugging me about this, I’ll talk to him.” You don’t really want to talk about this anymore. He usually came in late, 8:20pm was the time on your phone the last time he was here. Today had been a quiet day, two people coming in and staying for a while, nursing their drinks. A student had stayed for the better part of the day, ordering at least four drinks before leaving. Aether’s sister, Lumine, bought a chocolate when she came for lunch. She spared you a pitying look at the empty café, and the student in the corner, before walking out. She was another of the few regulars at Wangshu Coffee, although it was not due to her brother’s working here. Rather, she had been coming here since just after the shop had opened, and had encouraged her brother to work there, and Aether had asked you to apply with him to make the long hours less miserable.
You stare into the street for a while, maybe ten minutes, before you see him crossing the street. He’s wearing a dark hoodie, the hood down so you can see his black hair with teal highlights. You couldn’t see the small, diamond shaped mark on his forehead that you’d always wondered about yet, but as he got closer it got easier to see. He wore long blue pants and military boots. Aether sees him too, and he walks out into the storeroom with a chuckle.
“Good luck,” he gives you, before leaving you stranded.
“Hello,” you can’t really think of anything more to say. The conversation you had had before made you nervous, and you can’t help but focus in on his face.
“Good afternoon. A latte with almond milk to go, please?” He asks for the drink he usually has. You begin to prepare it. As you do, you begin to think about how you’re going to ask for his name.
Oh Morax, this is going to be awkward, you think.
“You know, you’re one of our two regulars here, so if it’s ok, can I have your name?” You ask him, preparing for the worst for talking to someone you didn’t really know in public. To your surprise, he answered.
“My name is Xiao. I don’t see why you don’t have more; this is the only place that doesn’t ridicule me for liking almond milk.” He replies. He has a smile on his face, as though it all that strange to ask that question out of nowhere. “Plus, your coffee is better than anything I or another coffee shop could make.” The compliment warms your heart more than you’d expect.
“Glad to hear you like it. Just six hundred Mora, please.” You hold out the scanner for him to pay, and as he reaches out with his phone, you notice an accessory you hadn’t seen before on him. There was a small metal square with a green diamond in the middle dangling by a small chain from his hoodie’s pocket. “I didn’t know you were a vision-bearer.” You comment as the payment goes through.
“Hmm? Ah,” he takes the vision and stuffs it back into his pocket. “I don’t like to flaunt it. Draws a lot of attention. Anyways, I should be going. I’ll be back tomorrow, maybe with a friend too.” He walks away, taking a sip from his coffee. You hadn’t seen it before, but his hoodie has an intricate green bird on the back, it’s wings reaching up and its tail feathers running long down to the end of the hoodie.
“Bye…” you answer, waving at his back. Aether comes out of the storerooms.
“Incredible job of convincing me that you aren’t in love with him. I’d say that if he stopped coming here you could get over him, but the smile on your face begs to differ.” He grins at you, and you finally notice the smile you didn’t know you were wearing.
You help Aether lock up not long after he leaves, at nine. As walk with him to the train stop, he doesn’t mention Xiao at all. It seems that learning his name had deterred him from asking about Xiao, as you had asked. Aether catches a different train from here, so you split up and you make your way home.
It began to rain, which didn’t match your mood at all, but you got home fast enough. Once you are inside, you heat some pizza and turn on the tv. Like you did in the morning, you did your jobs with it on. You finished the episode from the morning, the ending revealing that a once thought dead character was alive. Given that the next day was Friday, you decided to stay up later than normal. The next episode of the show was being released on Saturday, so you turned onto the news for a bit. Apparently, a bunch of vision-bearers, identified as not being Liyuen, were robbing a bank a couple blocks down. Some of Morax’s blessed adepti, the yakshas, were apprehending them. A couple buildings were destroyed, but no casualties so far.
You had heard of the yakshas before. They used to be an organisation, but they lost a lot of members, and now no one wanted to join. Something to do with the god of punishment forty years back. You weren’t born then. There were five of them, all adepti, and all vision-bearers. Only one had a Geo vision, a sign of Rex Lapis’ blessing. The other four had apparently already had visions when they joined, or Rex Lapis sought out other gods to make a more well-rounded team of warriors. The yakshas often slew evil spirits, or acted as elite war units in the few skirmishes Liyue had. While the Milleleth and those sanctioned by the Qixing acted as those who stopped crimes committed by normal people, and in recent years the yakshas had stopped many crimes committed by vision-bearers. As you watched, the camera footage showed them fighting, the robbers moving backwards, sort of your way, but far enough that you weren’t worried.
You swapped the tv from news to your game console. You’d been playing Super Slam Brothers with Aether every Friday after work since college, and you wanted to get ready for tomorrow. He usually played Gronkendorf, the main villain of the Legend of Lonk games. You set a bot up to play Gronkendorf, set it to the highest difficulty, and picked Erwin, a sword fighter from a game you hadn’t played, but had a hell of a lot of characters in Slam Brothers.
At around ten thirty, you decided that you’d played enough. Even though it was a shorter day tomorrow, you did still need sleep. You could hear some shouting outside, maybe two blocks away. Every time you had checked earlier, there wasn’t anything outside. You checked the news one last time, seeing that the robbers had almost halved in number and were trapped by the yakshas, not as far away as you had thought, being only on the other side of the building. The robbers had focused all their attempts on escaping, giving up on attacking the yakshas. Silent winds picked the robbers up, leaping far over the yakshas. It seemed that one of the robbers had and Anemo vision. One of the yakshas disappeared in a flash of green light and appeared above one of the robbers. He brought his spear down on the man, impaling him. One of the robbers soaring through the air began to glow with a brown light, blocking out the others as it grew brighter. The rest of the yakshas, running to where they would land, yelled out in fear. The tv showed a bright flash of the same light brown, before it cut out. As it did, a great cracking sound rang out, not from the tv but from the ground itself. Tremors and rumbling came from underneath your feet, stopping you from getting up as you started to panic. Great sounds of metal screeching and twisting filled your ears as a crack appeared in the floor, detaching the area you were standing on from the rest of the apartment. The floor was at an angle now, and the couch you were sitting on began to slide towards the wall and open air. You got up, fighting against the angle of the floor in an attempt to get off the crumbling parts of your apartment. The couch crashed through the wall, offering you a nice view of the ground far below. You managed to clamber your way almost to the crack between safety and certain death, but the screeching metal sound came again, and the angle got deeper, almost vertical now. You screamed for help as you fell, all the way through the gap in your wall and towards the ground.
You watched, looking towards the sky as your apartment fell after you. Your heart and stomach were long gone by now, an empty feeling in your belly replacing them. What a shame, you thought, I just learned Xiao’s name. Your brain hadn’t processed the thought of you dying yet. A couple other apartments seemed to be falling, but you couldn’t see any other people falling with them. Green particles formed around, and in a flash of light came one of the yakshas. A black and green mask, with a pair of horns and tusks covered their face. You felt arms under your back and legs, and saw the yaksha’s traditional clothes streaming towards the sky as the both of you fell. Your vision went dark, but you hadn’t closed your eyes. It cleared again, and although you were staring at the same sky, you were no longer falling.
“You?” The yaksha asked, in a voice of disbelief you could have sworn you’d heard before. He looked as though he were about to say something, but a yell rang out, making the yaksha look away and showing you his black hair. He set you down, and in those same particles he disappeared.