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When Ajax woke, it was to a cottony haze and the lingering numbness of cold on his back.
Air floated into his jaw as he breathed, the first huff of cool, fresh, real air he’d tasted in months, fanning out like splayed hair across cheeks that stung red and probably frostbitten. Cracks studded his teeth and lips, also probably. He could taste it like blood, even though he was quite sure that that was not how blood works. He didn’t know. His hands were still so small, and he wasn’t sure if it was them he could feel or if the warmth of his gloves was just cradling his knuckles like a phantom limb.
In the whiteness of leaking clouds, he could still see a blackened purple sky. It swelled and ebbed like an impossibly large bruise, specked with starry dust ripped to shreds by monsters his tongue wasn’t sure how to describe even after those three months. “You aren’t supposed to understand them.” Skirk had said. The ends of her legs were points that jutted cracks into an earth that wasn’t dirt, and her hands were curved and weirdly cautious as they cupped his rounder face to apply some sort of bandage beneath one eye. They’d all been devoured, she’d told his curious ask. I had to make them myself.
Why, of course, was what Ajax might’ve said in return. He couldn’t quite remember the details. No one had arms and legs that were purple and pointy and dimensional beneath the skin like tubes full of tiny, cosmic marbles. He wondered if they were bones. Weird bones that weren’t people-bones but something similar, malleable like plush toys but rigid and floating and with a vague resemblance to the charms of his mobile that hung in ropes from the ceiling.
There’d been a lot of bones, in the Abyss. Sometimes, they still had little bits of people attached to them. Or big bits, entire tummies and faces stripped bare from the waist down. And the bones were sometimes in little pieces, too. He didn’t know his back was supposed to have so many little bones in it, rather than one big and wiggly bone that bent and stretched as he hunched over cooking pots and learnt how to sharpen them down until they looked like Skirk’s funny legs. Even as he fought exactly as he was told to, until those unconscionable thingies with their hundred eyes and abscessed maws she insisted wanted him dead didn’t seem so scary anymore.
And, well, of course, Ajax had said again, maybe yesterday, or this morning. There were always going to be beasts that ate little boys like him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mama had told him about the one under his bed that’d come out if he stayed up too late or misbehaved. He’d always assumed she’d meant it’d gobble him up whole, like the chickens they kept when offered pudgy fistfuls of seeds.
He'd learnt a lot of things. It was a distant thought, flat-backed on the ground and the sky filtered in splotches of trees and branches that interlocked into ferns and bark overhead. The forest hummed with a blank sort of quiet, intermittently broken by a lone bird that’d missed a mate in the springtime or the foamy slosh of the river down the bank he’d tripped and grazed his knee on a few months ago, which still hadn’t healed.
Mama was going to be so impressed with his cooking, for starters. He made good soup, just like his sisters had before they’d left for big school. And he could repair clothes, and he could hunt so many enormous animals that Papa wouldn’t be able to resist remarking his pride. They’d be fed all Winter!
Oh, and he had so many funny stories to tell, too! He could tell them about the scary monsters and how very rude they were, playing with their food like enormous dogs. Gnawing and tossing it between digits before chomping down the head last, which was easily the worst way to do it because the head was nowhere near the best bit. And he could tell them about Skirk and her cold, bloodless hands, but how they were deft and cool as though she were fairy made of window frost and seemed to be completely invincible. And the bones, of course, there were just so many. He’d gotten so smart he knew basically everything about them, now. He had lots and lots of little bones in him. Even more bones than Mama and Papa, and they were kind of off-white and spikey like thousands of chalky crystals when broken.
He wouldn’t tell them about how much that’d hurt, though, or that he’d cried about it for what could’ve been anywhere between minutes and the better part of a couple hours. He was a big boy. A grown-up, even. His bones certainly felt different now, on the snow. They didn’t feel like they were connected to his muscles or his flesh or his head, like the little strings flopping his tongue sidelong or weaving down his neck had overextended loose and frayed to fibres. His head felt somewhere else entirely, like he’d left it on a shelf and forgotten about it. He was probably just hungry. He felt hungry.
In the far away, between the trees and their bark, a familiar noise screeched into his ears, the crunching of thick boots and steps hammering closer and closer until they stopped to spray flecks of snow over his muddied hair. Then hands on his shoulders propping him up, burning hotter than anything he’d ever felt through his jacket and undershirt and right down to the skin. Then arms looped around his shoulders and neck, bunching his scarf around his mouth and tied-back hair nestled at his earlobes.
And then more speaking, in a tone simultaneously frantic and soothing and shushing that came out muffled in the pitchy ringing that’d disrupted the silence since his heartbeat had slowed to a nascent crawl. And Mama, holding his face. A bit too tight, actually, and then her lips on his forehead that crackled like dying fireplaces.
“Ajax.” It sounded like she said, repeated a few more times like she was worried the shape of it in her mouth no longer made any sense, “My little chick.” And Ajax was a big boy, these days, with so many stories. But right now, he felt like a baby. His eyes had widened to polished ceramic like a pair of cracked, blue bowls full of boiling water. Mama. Mama.
She could hear him, he thought. He must’ve said it aloud, because she pulled back for a second as though expecting something else, something more. Mama. She hadn’t been able to hear him in the Abyss.
His mouth dropped open to let some syllables fall out, eyes finally lifting from where they’d been weighted to the floor to meet another pair that looked almost exactly like his. Mama’s eyes were very pretty. A little lighter, like an ocean horizon freckled with sand, and covered in sparkles where they caught the thin sunlight and reflected it back so much warmer.
For a second, they still looked like that. Pretty and big and shiny, like when she’d tell him stories and mend his clothes. Then, her eyebrows stiffened, crunching down her eyelashes into a dark and ruffled line that folded at the corners. Then, the middles tipped upwards, and her small mouth dropped open, though nothing came out in return.
And Ajax looked at her, slate strangely, uncannily blank except for the shuttering warmness under his ribcage and the specks of dampness at his eyes. And her eyes looked different. Wrong, maybe. She was looking at him now like how she’d look at the men in suits and masks from the palace coming to collect money or bribes, or the friend from school they’d ran into the other day she’d almost glossed over because he’d gotten a haircut. She didn’t look how she should’ve done, for that second, and Ajax felt like he was made of fluffy broken bones.
But then, she blinked, and the wrongness replaced itself with relief as she lifted him to his feet, bending at her knees to offer a gloved hand to his, which didn’t feel gloved at all. And it felt different as he took it, swinging ever so slightly in the breezeless air. But that would be okay, because he had so much to show her, and by then, the weirdness in her eyes would flatten back to normal.
When Tartaglia woke, it was to an early Liyuean sun that burnt far too gold, slipping silk through the tailored curtains wavering like goodbyes at his balcony and littering the carpet with oscillations of breath.
He’d tried. Really, he had. He always did. For his Tsaritsa, he always would. Her instruction was so clear, so rich with pride as she’d laid it out before him, bent and snapped sharp like cards at her feet. He was so clever, she’d said, so capable. She’d trust no one else to pull this scheme off. He was the only one who could be up to the task, and his heart had preened swollen at the praise as she’d smiled with a grace reserved only for her youngest Harbinger.
And then she’d. Lied to him. Set him up as though to make him out to be some kind of fool for all to see. Somehow, every step of the way, he’d been kept soft and pliable in her hands like putty. Managed to humiliate himself in front of two gods, some golden being he was sure was more than she seemed, and, worst of all, La Signora. If he never heard the end of it, it wouldn’t be soon enough.
In protest of his mind stretching itself to yank him back into unconsciousness, a hand rose from his elbow and fanned its fingers to split the white ceiling into chunks. The ends of his thumbnail were serrated, cutting a jagged landscape of trees and fauna between the immaculate paint.
It looked too much like Morepesok, for a moment. The dappled view from out the window of his bedroom dipped down into the forest and the river’s chalk rapids like a long back. A burst of blood that’d bloomed along his cuticles maintained some shape that resembled the cabin by the shore, loaded with distended fishing rods and long-bad bait and cobwebs cloying wares that’d probably been there longer than Tartaglia’s lifespan alive many times over.
He willed himself to recollect the scent of it. Musty, and generally stodgy and unpleasant because he’d only been in there the once, when his older brothers had taken him along fishing with them and gotten too inconvenient of a distance before realising they’d forgotten their rods. His eldest brother’s breath had puffed across his face in a thin cloud as he’d knelt down to shove the bait into his hands. The lock had clicked like pried-open teeth.
This room, by comparison, was far too sterile, like Dottore’s office but with much less an air of misery about it. In truth, along his skin lied no discernible feeling at all. The walls in their constant compression seemed more paradoxically dreamlike the more he leaned towards wakefulness. Like he’d been cut out from Tonia’s journal and glued back down into one of the foreign novels, still unread, stacked next to the crumpled pile of his uniform still drenched red between the creases.
In bed, he rolled over. He didn’t want to look at the books anymore. A pity, in some completely ridiculous, monetarily wasteful way. He had been intending to slog through them, but he doubted now that any of the strokes etched in Liyue’s beautiful script would’ve held any kind of meaning. Tonia would’ve probably got more use out of them. Perhaps he should enclose them in the next parcel to his family. Perhaps it’d persuade Mama and Papa to enclose some language of their own in return.
That’d have been nice. In its blankness, the room smelled like an enormous pot of stew with a thick crack circling the ceramic rim.
It was a better taste than the anger beginning to artificially corrode the sorrow, though not an easier thing to stomach if sparing it anything more than a passing thought. When he’d touch down at the palace, he’d rend every icy monument that dripped but never melted onto the long corridor’s peels of burgundy carpet. Whirl into the throne room, curtains and doors shattered into splinters by his shape, shadow splashing over the tiling as he tore his beloved Tsaritsa a new one. Completely regardless of who else might’ve been there. Probably under the ever-watchful stare of Pierro, who’d return it with little more than the usual lack of discernible compassion and a barely raised eyebrow.
But still, he’d scream. He’d fight them both right there and then if they commanded him to, or all the other Harbingers combined, or even he entire army and its reserves if it’d regain him some glimmer of reverence beyond being publicly lauded as Her Majesty’s eager little puppet, ready to ask how high if she requested he jump. Mouth riddled with insults and whys until he got something resembling an apology, even though it wouldn’t soothe the ache any better.
Even though he knew he’d never do that to begin with. He was weak. That was all this mess had shown. He didn’t have it within him.
Perhaps the start might resemble an echo along that pipeline. He’d seethe so headily on the long boat trip home that it’d foam the waves lapping at the hull like an infectious disease, decorum nothing but an afterthought if someone happened to interrupt his brooding. He’d be all grit teeth down the burgundy corridor. His thumbs would scar holes into the missive Her Majesty would inevitably fetch him with, prints pressing into each other like a punch frozen in tableau.
And then he’d march through the doors, steps practically woven into the many-stranded carpet. He always took the same steps. Muscle-memory, by now. It felt wrong to move any other way until he’d kneel before her, and he’d inhale the sheen of permafrost elegantly misting in constant ballet from her skin and desperately rebuild the knot it’d soften from his brow.
And then she’d speak. Tartaglia. My dearest eleventh. You did so well. She’d coo at him as though he were some sort of pet, and paradoxically, it’d melt him. His Tsaritsa had a beautiful voice. Delicate and fluttery around the edges, like snowflakes and a beating heart. A softness that’d invoke itself in her hands as she’d reach down to take his chin between her reddened fingertips, guiding his head to rest on her knee as her palm glided to his hair.
There’d be tiny beads of blood on his jaw, smudging indiscernibly onto her cloak and carving lines into his skull. The languid drag would shiver down his spine in some manner that felt simultaneously nurturing and perverse. Head emptying of any of the vitriol as she’d ease it from his tongue. Her nails were white and sharp, blue and chalky at the tips like misted glass, and the red would smudge beneath them. Welcome home.
And so, that’d be that, and he’d relish in the cycle nursing him once again.
In pre-emptive retrospect, the thought would’ve disgusted him if he had the emotion to spare it. She knew of his devotion. The entirety of Liyue probably did by now. Rex Lapis knew, and he probably thought it pitiful, if not so entirely laughable the humour of it all would be the one thing stopping him getting banned for the rest of his life. It was a core-deep kind of love. He could feel its pulse emanating in waves from the ground he walked on, flooding between the cracks of gemstone and disfigured monuments and shattering the air with the thrums of it when he spoke. It was still there even now, when nothing lingered on the surface of his senses at all. He felt like an empty notebook bound with red string.
Tartaglia rolled over again, sheets curling lazily around his legs before slipping off the bed entirely. It was still so overwhelmingly bright. The sun seemed caught in the fabric folds cocooning him in its shelter-turned-web, tracing rolled beams of light through the gaps in his lashes and splintering across his forehead and eyes as though crushed. It dripped into the gaps between adhesive and skin on his shoulders and stomach. Some needed changing. That was a problem for later.
The warmth, at least, was something tangible. The barren space behind his ribcage felt both mottled and churning in an abundance of detail. It brought up the realisation that he was much younger than he remembered he was, sometimes. He tried to stomach it down, like swallowing vomit. The soles of his feet skimmed the floorboards besides the bed, and the sun poured into the scars his back had garnered like abstract splatterings of paint.
Rex Lapis (or, he supposed, Zhongli) hadn’t been able to resist commenting on the acrid juxtaposition of it. But of course, that’d been the case. He was so incredibly old, after all. Everything probably seemed young to him. The warmth settling into a gash near the base of his spine, hooked like an anchor around the hipbone, huffed over his skin like the constant rhythm of being chided to just stop and breathe, once in a while. On and on and on, only until he finally tried it.
Fresh air through his teeth, horizon blooming splotchy violet like over-watered paint, and the world’s perpetual state of flux catching on the vibrance of its own technicolour. Cor lapis burrowing into one cheek, studying his expression as the second-hand ache of its presence sanded gently at its own edges. There’d been so much, in that moment. Nearly too much, actually, but just for then, he leaned into it.
Zhongli had smiled at him, but he’d only caught it a few moments later. Take a moment to stop and breathe. He’d said, and, if only for that fraction of a second, the false identity he’d known dissolved like shattering glass, blinding truth reflected in ripples along the endless, golden ocean. There’s plenty enough air to go around.
Really, Tartaglia should’ve guessed from the start. They’d spent so much time together, though it had been chiefly for business purposes. Still, he’d enjoyed it. Zhongli cared about what he had to say. Laughed at his recycled jokes, taught him new things until he felt almost like the land he’d been treading however long was one he was discovering for the first time again. He’d stripped back the blades of him with so careful a hand Tartaglia hadn’t even noticed his lack of spines until he’d failed to get scratched by the sharpness of them.
At least, it’d felt like that, at the time. He doubted Zhongli could’ve cared less about the fact he was getting decent with chopsticks, now. He’d have nothing to say about how those books would be shipped off to Tonia and never held by his hands again, touch last imprinted when thumbing through the pages of unfamiliar writing. Tonia couldn’t read Liyuean script. She’d not recognise the penmanship indicating his own name, nor the fact it was the only one she knew him by.
In the blankness of it, his elbows hunched themselves over onto his knees, skin cracking dryly like a nesting doll with its insides removed and cremated, the ashes stuffed back down his throat. The white room seemed to constrict at the corners where shade pooled, nibbling at the furniture until all that remained was the chilly static of his feet pressed against the floorboards.
His skin felt scaffolded by his own bones and incomplete, like a collection of unstitched fabric hanging off a mannequin. He was an idiot. A moron. A complete fool, laughingstock ready to be tossed and cooked low and slow and lapped up by the masses for the gain of no-one certain. Or second-hand, the last-resort option of one consciously careless. Like a fishing rod in an abandoned cabin, frequented only by children and desperate folk. A rotting bucket of bait that attracted nothing but flies.
The gnaw of it stung like sickness. A crystalline sheen glued his lashes together at the bases of each eye, pathetic and late and selfish. All of it too small to fill the cavity cutting sinkholes from his stomach, threatening to swallow him from the inside out. There was nothing at his edges. The walls were white. His legs dangled into it, and his head was both hollow and full of writhing insects.
An anger flickered briefly once again in his gut, and with burning hands, he clung onto it. Blisters bubbled a row at the base of each finger, tangible and alkaline as salted wounds. And so, he rose and forced himself outside. Blades wrapping around his hands and cutting his skin as they carved themselves around it, droplets thrown onto the perfect floorboards and stinging at bone and sinew. It was a masochistically vile sensation, no matter how used to it he’d grown. It was better than nothing.
When Childe wakes, it’s to some of the worst pain he’s ever felt in his life.
Worst in comparison to what he can recall, at least. He’s been in near misses before. Or so he’s been told. A lot of the memories around those times are dreamlike at best, almost as though they’d been implanted into his brain and his body is still in the process of spitting them out. It’s a collage of needles and billowing coats and disjointed voices warbled through five layers of history, pressed down like flowers between the pages of medicinal textbooks. It’s heavy, but never comfortable.
Now, that heaviness drips like thick snowfall between his joints. The texture of the feeling is clumped, but hot and grainy like desert sand. The memories slosh like an hourglass spun constantly on rotation, teetering on the edge of unreality and occasionally smacking against the insides of his skull with a realism that rattles his stomach with nausea. Pieces of it slot into shapes that resemble himself in the morbidity of infancy. Revolving in a singular, spherical eye flattened in barotraumatic compression.
A thought flickers and bursts in a sudden swell of spears and weaponised infinity, and every other thought flashing in his head dissolves in the sunspots of disjointed memories. A gaping maw ricochets towards his head. His shoulders pulsate and collide with an enormous, plasmic body, tearing starry chunks from its skin as the flesh wriggles and writhes like jelly. Electricity throbs in his veins with the addictive overuse of it. Saliva collects at his lips at the thought.
It tastes like satisfaction, in the chameleon colour-change of bruises in Mirabelle and sloe and cherry cooked down into jam, fingertips pruned from a narcotic over-exposure to Hydro and macerated slices of himself pips volunteered to the starved Abyss. Through the sheen of bone-deep ache, some broken, most likely, the relief of it skips stones along his heartbeat.
Nothing juts from his skin, but there’s a serrated itch to his scaffolding. His bones feel at once too real, like they’re actually in him. The pulse propping his eyes half-open is sluggish. Weighted with layers upon layers of bandages, plaited like hair and woven in protective baskets over cushy panels soaked pink. There’s something in his system, he notes only as an afterthought. The pain, despite its undeniable prominence, aches like a longing suggestion from a face he can no longer put a name to. It’s the only reason he’s conscious, he thinks.
A smile instinctively tugs at one corner of his mouth. Its twitchy and barely there, but it’s for no one to see. His body feels lacerated all over, as though he’s been stitched up bit by bit with rusted needles and his skin’s tinged green in the oxidization. Probably gave whichever frantic team of doctors he was transferred to a series of collective heart attacks. Probably going to get an earful from the next person who discovers him conscious.
It hurts. Everything hurts. He’s too aware of his own limbs and how they’re strung up at all manner of odd angles, bent like architectural diagrams and equations. There’s a particularly thick swaddling of bandages somewhere around his left ankle. He rotates it experimentally, only to be rewarded with a flash of agony so boiled it nearly flickers his eyes into the back of his skull. And, post-that, he’s exhausted. His mouth loosens. He can feel his teeth rocking in the space above his bottom lip, any attempt at clenching his fingers around the fluffy sheets futile beyond the smallest suggestion of life. His hands cramp in their inactivity. His veins are softened around the knuckle.
But god, that had been fun. The only sector of his brain with any energy left buzzes like wings down a whetstone. If he weren’t so swaddled, his jaw would’ve likely split. He was probably near split himself, now that he thinks about it. Thrilling. Sating, and the mental note seems to sap those wings’ wind-rush to a crawl as the sharpening sands itself down to a pillow. For the first time in ages, the pulse and bones in his body actually feel like his.
He's being rocked, he realises as the embers of friction die out. In a constant, rhythmic drone of movement and globed sound that creaks starboard to scoop up the heavens in its simple enormity. He’s on a boat, it seems. Someone must’ve put him there. It hadn’t been him, but even in the haze, Childe could hazard a guess. There are only so many blurs of purple and pearl and jutting, knife-like limbs. Even if they’d rounded out somewhat over time.
He feels like a child. The aptness doesn’t surprise him. If he lets his eyes droop and grasps for a threadbare consciousness, he could fool himself into believing he’s someone much smaller, safe and warm in the arms of his mother. His ears are stuffed with the cotton of stories, clogged with folklore and fables and frosty at the edges where his earmuffs didn’t reach. He can hear the crackle of a kinder hearth. His father is laughing at something in the next room.
Mother pulls away for a moment to look at him, taps her lips to his forehead, then stares again. Her lips are a crescent painted onto a cloudy sky. She has beautiful eyes.
In a colder part of his memory, his head is back on his Tsaritsa’s bony lap, atop layers and layers of thick fluff and fur and concealed stitching. His arms are simultaneously folded out and limp like a lifeless cushion, wrists suddenly spindly and swaying besides her thigh as frostbite creeps under his nails. She’s saying nothing she’s not said before, but that doesn’t matter. The orders and platitudes and hypnotic praise sound perfect in her voice.
Childe thinks about the plush rosebud of her top lip and how it isn’t a touch chapped as it presses feather-light, like a phantom, against his purple cheek. The shells of his ears are falsely warm in the solitary frost with the palace’s gnaw of cold air, and the earring that usually sways freely besides his face is folded down his shoulder and still like obedient hands. The drums trill like timpanis with the endless flurry of snow battering against the windows outside, and he does not think about her eyes.
Something about it makes him want to cry. His mind lags at a stammering crawl. His palms are shaking too much to attach a meaning as to why, and exhaustion tugs his emotions back into expressionlessness. He’s not sure if anything is falling down his face. It doesn’t feel wet.
This was meant to be a holiday, wasn’t it? The clarity only bashes itself over his head in the aftermath, and it’s funny enough that a noise which in no universe sounds like a laugh bursts itself out of his throat and leaves him involuntarily quavering against his sheets and bindings.
Some rest, that was. Look where that’s landed him. It still somehow feels entirely his own fault, even though, this time, the entire nation is well aware he had absolutely nothing to do with any of the whole charade to begin with.
First time in his career a break had been specifically requested, if he’s recalling correctly. Right now, the burnout seemed to have transferred from its strains of mental agony to the physical equivalent. He’s not sure which is worse.
It’d been a collection of muddled things in the final week before he’d snapped and found himself bowed before Her Majesty, pointedly refusing to betray any glimmers of weakness beyond the verbal request for a holiday. Her approval had him deflating in relief like a huge balloon. He hadn’t even known he’d been so constantly tensed until he fell backwards onto his bed and muscles he hardly knew existed started aching.
He hoped whoever had moved his luggage in his stead had the presence of mind to pack the souvenirs he’d bought for his family. A butter dish for his mother, a pair of mechanised spectacles for his father, and various gadgets and toys for the children, all of which carried a hefty price tag he intended on never letting them know the sum of. He’d wrapped them neatly that same night, paper weaving around the tricky shapes and bolts. The shopkeepers had selected the wrappings and bows. They knew what’d match perfectly.
It was a good thing he’d sorted all that first. Knowing his luck, he’ll probably be banned from Fontaine for some time, despite the fact he still has very little idea of what he’d actually done to begin with. La Signora would’ve found it hilarious. She probably still does. The embossed chill of her cackling will probably echo around the throne room and prickle in the winds above where she’s buried when he’s home, vaulting from the few blips of her spirit that haven’t long been carried back to Mondstadt. Arlecchino will laugh for her, he supposes. It’ll come out fonder, richer like melted chocolate and slicked with gasoline as she toys with his temper. It will feel less biting, but the reality will be no less. He serves some purpose to Arlecchino still, he reckons, so she won’t be too cruel. She is not the Tsaritsa. There’s no need to convince Arlecchino of his value.
That’d all be unless that utterly ridiculous conviction is overturned, of course. But right now, Childe can’t bring himself to think about it or its storied political ramifications. Through the veil of pain his clarity shies behind, his mind tears and weeps in trying to sift thought through to rationality. Remembering beyond flashes of basic knowledge is nigh on impossible. The comparison brings with it a maddening kind of despair that is wet and exhausted under his bags.
He can only hope that the Iudex’s mercy is as swift as his punishment, or that he at least caught wind of the past month of Childe’s life spent single handedly preventing the entire country and then some from being devoured in one fell swoop. Once again, the idea makes him want to laugh, but he knows better this time. He settles for a smile. It tinges a sharpness through his jaw anyway. The bandages strain strangely tighter around his chest, as though he’s been wrapped up in tiny, writhing scales and tongues.
It’s easier to keep the thought pulsing as plain hope, nothing more. It’s a skill he’d had to practise after first falling to the Abyss, like an angel gluing feathers back on to the structure of scorched wings and protruding, broken bones, he thinks. He’s much better at it these days. It almost feels like second nature again.
There’s a deep comfort in it, scorching his limbs white-hot in a masochistic security that gnaws against the tiredness and pain. Once again, he feels small and slight, like a lop-eared rabbit nestled in an endless sea of shrubbery so tall and wavy it blots out the sun in wicked spurts of breeze. Safe, and pliant, and wilfully thoughtless as he purges the misery from his mind and lets himself float above blankets and seas and fish and deep, sunken bones somewhere far above and below the chunked sand.
Nothing will challenge him here. Not in this odd bliss, where his body and this room all at once feel and smell and sound so real while everything beyond the smoky walls drips with a dreamlike quality that slithers through the panels like breath. He feels complacent, but happy. Serene, almost, after voluntarily tearing through every last reserve of his physical and mental energy. He’s not felt like this in a long, long time. He isn’t sure if this is a good or bad thing. He doesn’t decide on it.
What need is there, anyway? He probably won’t remember this. He’s still so tired. Serenity is tiring, he thinks so distantly it barely registers as a thought at all. Perhaps that’s why he avoids it. Perhaps that’s why, even if it’d taken so many years, he’d needed a break so badly to begin with. Perhaps he should probably stop doing that. But no, he thinks, finally. He isn’t going to remember this.
The bandages and medical restraints tacked across his skin itch fuzzily against the nerves as his sense of them melts into the room’s warm crucible of air, and the blanket crumples and wavers abstractly in a psychedelic wave of non-movement as the ocean’s arms continue to rock him deeper. Whatever’s in his system seems to have weirdly realised his consciousness and dialled up its effects. The pain that’d blinded him seems more like a suggestion now, reaching him seconds too late like extraplanetary starlight and bundled like babes from the harshness of outside.
He wants to think about other planets, and stars. It feels like forever since he’d first seen them. He still has so much to learn, even after thinking once he’d already learnt everything he could. Nothing was any less terrifying than it had been as a child, when he’d been all soft flesh and tiny limbs and enormous, damp eyes. The things that could’ve killed him then could still kill him now. He was still soft flesh, after all. Longer limbed, duller eyed. Still human, and therefore fallible.
But, of course, he might’ve said. The uncomprehensible would never be any less scary. He was just braver, these days. And that paralytic terror has some kind of optic beauty about it, in how his heart sweats in its racing and his hands tense and fold and his face narrows and screws and shapes around its total lack of understanding. Horror’s dread sinks into his stomach like the supermassive gravity of falling in love, and it swallows his starlight and humanity and strips him naked to a creature so fragile bravery electrifies his pulse in waves to keep it from stopping.
And, yes, of course, he would have said. He was a grown-up, now. Grown-ups were brave and smart and still hungry. Even though he had so much money, now. His family would be fed all Winter. Mother wouldn’t need to worry about repairing old gloves for the nth time, pricking her older fingers in the low candlelight pinpointedly squeezed through the needle’s prying eye. He could keep her warm.
He's older now, and nothing can hurt him. Somewhere, in childhood, his mother is rocking him in her arms. She is so happy, pink-cheeked and smiling, and he is so small and bright and unblemished. Somewhere, his head is on the Tsaritsa’s lap. Her fingers are ice cold and sharp as they scrape through his hair, and she loves him, and he is thoughtless and docile as a deer bleeding out on a cottony swathe of crystal snow.
Somewhere, sometime now, he is on a boat sailing towards what’s likely some echo of home. He is alone, and he is warm and cannot remember fear and, somewhere, everything hurts. He is real, and he’s not been real for so long. He’s a tangible thing. Flesh, and fragile. His fingers are broken, the prints scraped away and disfigured. He’s only a child, and he wants his mother.
In some misted haze, his father laughs at something in the next room over. His brothers are taking him fishing, and all he can smell is the bait. Tonia is reading Teucer a book, translated into the Snezhnayan alphabet. She cannot read Liyeuan, and her voice is squeaky and flutters like a hummingbird flitting around words she’s never tried to pronounce out loud. He’s home, and there’s an enormous pot of stew bubbling away in the kitchen. His earmuffs are the slightest touch too small. They don’t quite reach the shells of his ears.
Childe feels his eyelashes droop along the tops of his cheekbones somewhere far away. He doesn’t think, but his mind flits dreamily alive with the peculiar chill of involuntary sleep, pictures growing indistinct and stranger and more blotted as his awareness of them drips away into the foam rocking at the ship’s unknowable hull. There is a smile on his lips, but he will not register that it hurts until he tries it later. Consciousness has nothing more for him, here.
Far away, Childe wakes, and there’s a frostbitten numbness at his back and a cloudy haze misting his thoughts like windows and there are the shadows of bones embedded into sheets of cloud-stricken sky. And his mother’s lips press against his forehead, her arms pulling him into her so tight it is as though she’s scared her body has forgotten the feeling of him so close.
She hasn’t looked at him yet, not properly. His head is still nestled besides her cheek, hair splaying out against her skin as he fights the urge to cry. And then she finally pulls away to look at him, her eyes beautiful and blue and sparkling, and his eyes look just like hers, and everything is perfectly ordinary.