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She’s 22, and she's about to get in trouble like a little girl.
It’s Tuesday, the most anticipated day of the week, so easily ruined for being granted so early. It’s also the worst day to find her burrowed in bed with her leg limp outside the sheets. She can’t really feel it outside the pain that flares up every now and then and that subsides when she makes any attempt to acknowledge it. Sometimes it continues as she’s staring down at her skin, sometimes it beats like an insect flapping its wings against her bones. With her brother they've ruled out a sprain and a fracture, and it can’t be an issue with her sleeping form because it hurts when it wants and not when she moves it. When she lies down, she lets it hang over the edge of the mattress like she used to when she was little, hopefully enticing the right monster to tear it out of its socket. The rest of her is splayed supine like a starfish. Her wrist pulses oddly. She’s had this problem for months.
With the right amount of will, she could sit up and drag one leg next to the other, touch her toes in the stretch she imagines is reserved for ballerinas, and leave for her training, but the image of two white blanks staggers the thought before she can commit. This problem she’s had for years, on-and-off. It’s her training day; she polished her sword yesterday but does not want to see Father today. The thought alone nearly makes her convulse with shame, to which she spares a brief acknowledgement before promptly growing annoyed. She hasn’t managed to control it, not the despair nor the shame, despite making amends with their inevitable return. The idea of seeing her and the idea of betraying her by refusing to are so repulsive she thinks she might never move again, but every few months the repulsion nests inside of her as if it hadn't occurred to it before.
She considers curling up in a ball like the woman they retrieved last week to see if it would make her feel better, but she figures the results would be the same. Father had tied a belt around the woman's wrists at the end of everything, as if to prevent her from ripping a hole in the bag, but she hadn’t restrained her during the interrogation. There was no point. The woman had closed her eyes and gone elsewhere.
Her pulse slows down to a whistle, like a pressure boil. The sigh that comes out of her mouth is much the same.
Lyney takes one look at her and tucks a hair behind her ear before walking back out. She never has to ask him to deliver the lies that will get them in trouble.
On Tuesdays, she can’t have breakfast and must skip lunch. Father runs a physical check before battle drills, with which, it is said, she hopes to preserve the children’s sense of urgency in real life.
“Out in missions, alone in the vastness of Teyvat, and even in the midst of battle, you won’t have the privilege of being well-rested and well-fed. You’ll be at the mercy of your dwindling resources, and this exhaustion—this desperation—could be the only barrier between you and your untimely death. Summon your will and surrender to your ephemeral flesh.”
Lynette is not sure if Father thinks they’ll forget or hate her for it, but she recites it before every exam. Because it can’t be the latter, it makes her unbelievably grumpy to be called stupid on an empty stomach. She opens her eyes a little wider in an attempt to amend her expression when Father gets close, even though it doesn’t make a difference to her what Lynette’s face does, and sheds the fabric everywhere Father poses her eye.
Needless to say, last week’s excuse landed poorly. Lynette rarely ever falls sick and Lyney is the best liar in the trade, but Father is responsible for too many of his missions. She knocked on Lynette’s door that night, silently slithered through the open crack, and asked for permission to touch her. Upon contact, bare hand on soft flesh, her forehead was flushed so hot Father almost believed her.
She doesn’t eat on Thursdays either, but it’s a somewhat happier compromise. She weighs the same as her brother and she’s found this condition to be a nonnegotiable. It’s a safeguard against disappearing: when he holds her, when she replaces him in a coffin. They are indistinguishable in every way. When Lyney is out in the grounds with Father, she pretends it’s her instead, interchangeable wires in a grafting machine.
Unlike Lyney, she barely looks in the mirror. Out in Elynas, with the water a long drop away, she’s a pinprick of light from the peak of the highest mountain.
She suppresses a smile of self-satisfaction when Navia notices her long hair. She gasps in delight, tentatively hovering a hand over Lynette’s low ponytail. It is not obvious to everyone that she has short hair, but it is also not clear that she has anything else behind the bow punctuating her head. It pleases her to confuse. Clorinde mentions Father and Lynette feels a purr brewing in her throat.
This Tuesday she loves her beyond comprehension. Instead of hungry, she’s sleep deprived, and there is no softness in Father’s gaze when she relays her mistakes. When Lynette patches herself up, Father doesn’t touch her, but hovers a hand over her knee protectively. When it rains on their way back, Father gives her her coat.
Father never touches them. Father always speaks frankly. For this, Lynette loves her best. For this, Lynette thinks, Father is just like me.
When they were thirteen, Father swiped at Lynette’s lower back with the blunt end of her spear during practice, and Lynette bruised for so long they thought she might have hemorrhaged. Lyney didn’t talk to Father for weeks until Lynette asked him to—she could not stand Father’s far superior, more refined silence.
They leave on a mission tomorrow. This is her favorite Father: the odd touch on their neck, the intel review at the dining table, the dining table itself. Father in the candlelight, food swooshing in their stomachs; the stone path, the night ahead, the gaze from the doorway. Her favorite Father, then no Father for months.
During their travels, Lynette reads books about the myths up north. They have every category of fae and superstitions about the unlit dark, which strikes her as strange considering the kind of people that stop there, the kind of things they’re looking for. She reads about a woman who flings herself off a cliff and becomes sugar on the sand upon impact. She reads about sentient machines that can see the future and malfunction afterward. She reads about a wisp of flame that starts guiding the dead to the other side, just to leave them stranded among the living. She reads about one impossibly long coil of smoke coating the sea. This one she might have dreamed.
Every few pages, she reads a passage to Lyney, her smiling very rudely, him listening silently. He says they should plan a show in the region, but only the first time. For some reason, they talk about it all winter, making up stories when the trails go cold. It’s February and every lake is frozen—the swirls on the ice look like seelies in the morning light. Every three hours, they find either a flyer for Liyue’s lantern festival or crystalflies dead in the grass. Their compass, a gift from Freminet, stops forever while pointing north. They start suspecting their first target might be dead.
She sends word of it home. Lyney is asleep and her pain is flaring up. The scratch of the pencil reminds her of Father's spear on the floor, following her out of the hotel without so much as a goodbye. The memory makes her want to fall asleep, but she doesn’t.
They stop by the festival in the end because no one invited them and it is so far out of the way. Lyney’s not wearing his hat and Lynette gets too cold with her hair up. Because the stalls are crowded and they fear running into an old face, they forego the main event. Lynette whispers a secret into their cupped hands instead; a wish of breath held until the last second, then promised to the wind like so many lanterns in the Liyue sky. Arlecchino does not write back.