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Childe was no stranger to losing a home. 

Perhaps this was why sitting in Zhongli’s apartment never ceased to feel so unreal.

Day after day, he woke up, the sun creeping in through the windows, and he would turn to face the love of his life. 

And wonder when this would all inevitably come crashing down. 

Because Zhongli was perfect. And the space Childe used to inhabit, where Guizhong once sat, was once filled with perfection, as well. And Childe knew there would come the day when Zhongli would realise that Childe wasn’t good enough for his perfection.

—

Zhongli’s son, Xiao, seemed to already know the truth. Xiao was eternally crabby, and what little eye contact he conceded to giving Childe for his father’s sake was marked with poisonous disdain.

“What are you even doing here,” Xiao has snapped more than once.

“That’s what everyone else asks too, buddy,” Childe laughs off in return.

He doesn’t let his smile abate. No matter what, he can’t have Zhongli’s teenage-almost-adult son deal with Childe’s issues when Guizhong still weighs heavy in the household’s memory. Or at all. Children shouldn’t have to deal with the darkness of the adult world, and Xiao has already seen enough pain for a lifetime. 

But Childe does not lie. People do, indeed, ask that question frequently. It was in fact the first question on the first form he ever touched when stepping onto this new land. It was only when they gave him a new name and he recorded himself over and over again for hours on his antiquated cellphone until he had eradicated all trace of the motherland from his speech, that people stopped asking. 

—

Zhongli is first introduced to the staff a week before the beginning of the school term. They’re in the pathetic imitation of a real teacher’s lounge, his fellow teachers are all sprawled against the speckled grey walls, floor, and for the lucky few, perched atop rickety wooden stools. They’re nursing plastic cups of hot milk, leftovers from the powdered milk stash the government had mandated for the children to intake daily. When they want to work, their teaching desks in their classrooms double as actual desks.

The principal, a lithe woman with pale, thin skin, stretched over her visible veins, her hair long and blonde, smiles a little as she walks in through the door. It’s rare that she smiles. There’s a reason why she’s affectionately referred to as ‘Her Majesty’ amongst the staff. Her countenance is usually marked by quiet yet powerful movements, and her emotions rarely flitter across her face, almost always pulled into a wickedly neutral expression. Even as debtors have threatened to take the school down, knives in their hands and knives in their speech, she has remained ever so icy in her countenance, still and calm as the surface of a frozen lake. 

So to see a small curve play on the corner of her pale lips is… shocking.

“Fellow staff,” she addresses, affixing her fingers into a latticework, tangling her hands together. None other than her can make it seem so elegant. “I have thrilling news to share.”

She moves to the side, away from the entrance, to reveal a person standing in the doorway. 

“I have procured a new, and hopefully permanent,” she says, lowering her head, “history teacher.”

“Woah, your Majesty,” the Doctor snickers, peeling himself from the wall he’s been stuck to the whole time he’s been marking a thick stack of homework. His faded blue dye reveals brown at the roots. A pair of visored sunglasses obscure his eyes. From a disastrous fistfight, several tussles, and hair pulling, Childe knows there’s a thick scar that cuts over his right eye, and it's completely milky white. No one knows how it happened, just like no one knows what comes after ‘Doctor’ in his name.

“You found a replacement for Scaramuccia already?”

"Yes,” she says, “please welcome Mr. Zhongli warmly, please. Get him settled in and acquainted with the student list, and show him Scaramouche’s old files so he can review the curriculum.”

“Hello,” the man says, bowing slightly. Back straight, knees unbent. Liyuen, Childe clocks instinctively. He has a spindly figure but his hands are calloused and there’s a little bit of muscle below the loose fitting suit he wears. Probably passable in a fight, given his strong rooted stance. He reminds himself quickly that this isn’t the time and place to analyse all of this. “I hope that we can get along well enough.”

He covers it well, but Childe can still hear the lilt to his tone, the airy syllables where one would settle down into hard consonants. It's barely there, but Childe picks up on it nonetheless. Still, he must learn how to pronounce the man’s name. He barely heard it as the Tsaritsa said it. John Lee? Johng lee? It sits foreign on his tongue. He knows little of how to pronounce Liyuen words, just their mannerisms.

He says none of this, and instead kicks himself off the wooden stool he’s commandeered to step forward and shake Zhongli’s hand. 

“Let’s get along,” he says, “or the children will pick up on it and they’ll learn nothing.”

Zhongli laughs, and it's deep and low, reminiscent of his father’s baritone. Childe flicks the memory away to lead the man to the former history teacher’s stack of files stuffed into the metal filing cabinet donated by one of the parents years ago. 

His fellow staff jeers and cackles, and Childe flips a middle finger behind his new colleague’s back, facing it towards the rest of his idiot coworkers. 

No matter what country one is in, there is one universal sign for “fuck you,” thankfully.

—

 He leads the man through the run-down red-brick they call a school. It’s a small compound, about five classrooms, one teacher’s ‘lounge’, a small alcove they’ve installed a door into and called Her Majesty’s ‘office’, and two bathrooms that they’ve had to fight the county to fix the rusted pipes so the children don’t come home with tetanus. 

To his credit, Zhongli seems quite alert even as Childe explains the workings of a school halfway to keeling over with the slightest touch from the county mayor, if not for the fact that the current one got his position through good old nepotism and is too busy swimming in bribes and partying it up hundreds of miles away to care about some shitty school in the outskirts. 

“So that’s the school,” Childe says, “it’s shabby, as you can tell, so don’t be afraid to patch it up or call one of us if you need help repairing a ceiling tile or something.”

The man smiles. “I will be sure to do so. I am eager for classes to begin, actually, it has been a long time since I have been able to teach my knowledge to anyone.” 

“You know, you seem pretty smart,” Childe hums, “whatcha doing in a place like this? I’m sure some hotshot school up in the suburbs would be better off for a man of your calibre.”

The man shakes his head. “I have nothing to prove my prowess. In fact, your boss was the one to help me apply for my teaching certificate. I have no formal degree, all I’ve learnt is from my own reading.”

Childe whistles. “Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to handle the learning part. As for the guiding children part… well, despite how small this hovel looks, we serve a lot of kids in the area. You might encounter some rowdiness.”

The man chuckles, again, that tone that rings something in his heart. “I am quite used to the rambunctiousness of children. I have a son at home, I’m sure I will be well prepared.”

“Oh, really? What’s his name?” Childe asks.

They don’t know it yet, but as Childe and Zhongli sit in one of the empty classrooms, the fans firmly off to save energy, the window shutters broken leaving streams of choppy light illuminating their faces, this is the start of something real.

—

The school year begins with the usual hectic day filled topmost with mayhem. They’re the only government school for miles around, and they’re situated right smack in the middle of the slums and the rundown apartments. Most of the children aren’t eager to go to school, and some parents are reluctant, but there is an air of hope still that surrounds the school. Even though it's halfway to crumbling, has terrible ventilation, and the lightbulbs are still fluorescent, it's their only chance to push their children out of poverty through education. Which is why no matter how shitty he and his coworkers are to each other, they will always try to put on a smile for the children. It is important that they encourage them to come to school and cultivate an environment where they will hopefully work to find a future where they aren’t pushed to the margins.

Childe is in charge of teaching them the common language, ironically. He had raised an eyebrow when Her Majesty has proposed he take the teacher’s license for the common language, especially when he was still trying to stamp his accent out, flattening his tongue instead of overcurling it for his R’s, and trying to shift his tone into something that the people he was now a part of considered friendly. Still, he’s become excellent at it, now, after hours at his cellphone and in front of his mirror, controlling his voice to become level and perfect. Just another perk of his former life. His training taught him to be adaptable, and he is!

The day passes as he picks up the morning classes to go through tenses with the younger children while wrangling back their attention spans, and sneaks bites of the fish pie he had baked in the morning in between classes. He breezes through the afternoon classes with the older children, outlining the proper uses of the double negative and passive voice sentences, who one would expect to be less rowdy, and they are, except they have, inadvertently, over the holidays, adopted a far more passive-aggressive manner of speaking.  

He watches the last of his students stream out of the building, making their way home, and then finally opens the door to the teacher’s lounge and slams himself on the floor right underneath the shakily spinning ceiling fan. 

“The children are certainly livelier this year,” Pantalone comments. “I had to stop two of them from going at each other’s throats this morning.”

The math teacher perpetually speaks with an air of laissez-faire consideration. Not even like the Tsaritsa, he seems genuinely languid and finds most inconveniences minor. Childe has seen him in a frenzy only once and that was when a student called his skills in integration and differentiation into question, only for him to pull out a frankly ghastly integral and solve it in a matter of seconds  that, if Childe were to be faced with, personally would have barfed straight out of a window. 

“Speak for yourself, they were all so charming and obedient as ever,” Columbina hums, her voice melodious as always. As the school’s special education teacher, she has a talent when it comes to coaxing children into blooming. The children are all obedient when placed in front of her, as if possessed by a spirit of calm. Childe wishes he had her skills. 

“Yeah, right. I had to stop them from breaking the copper wires during the practical experiment today,” Sandrone sniffs. The physics teacher already has her short bob tangled into a messy nest, and dark rings circle under her eyes reminiscent of owls. She also doubles as the lower-years science teacher, and it shows in her eternal crabbiness.

“Well, there’s not much harm they can experience in your class,” the Doctor butts in, “now, think of me, I’ve had to move our chemistry classes outdoors because of how often these children cause accidents!”

“Now, now, people,” Pulcinella says. The wizened old man, with graying hair wisping at the sides, two stout and round glasses perched on his oddly long nose, “let’s not argue. This school year is starting off just like always… with a bang.”

“That’s easy for you to say, old man, all you do is do our paperwork. Must be an easy life,” Arlecchino grumbles. The gym teacher has a sheen of sweat across her nose bridge, and her hair has been swept into a mess as well. 

“I have also taken up the geography teacher’s position, if you remember,” Pulcinella reminds.

“I wonder if that Johng-lee guy is going to come in and hang out with us,” Childe hums from his spot on the floor. “Or maybe he’s went home? He does have a son, after all.”

“And the rest of you haven’t felt another’s touch in years,” Arlecchino scoffs. On her left ring finger glints a simple silver band. It isn’t conventional, but their paycheck isn’t good enough for that, and either way, Columbina and Arlecchino’s love for each other more than makes up for the fact that their bands are plain. 

“Now that the history teacher’s position is filled,” Sandrone hums, “what of the geography teacher? Poor ‘Nella has been teaching geography despite the fact that the land’s probably changed since he’s crawled out the hole he was born from.”

“I dunno,” Childe says, “but maybe he knows someone interested?”

—

The day ends, usually, with Childe slinging his ruffle sack over his shoulder and bidding goodbye to his colleagues to collapse in his cramped one-room apartment down the street. It’s on the twelfth floor, the rent is a steal, and he spent most of his first paycheck on renovating it so he doesn’t wake up to black mold in the ceiling and rust in his taps. It’s completely ass, still, but it's been home for the better part of a decade, and he knows nothing else but this any longer. 

He tries not to think of any sort of life before this. This should be all he knows. And what would he reach for, anyways? He has nothing else left. All that he’s been able to keep, despite his best efforts, is that thrice-damned letter.

We commend you for your efforts in the field… in compensation…

—

In this school, he is most certainly the teacher the children take the most to… until now, that is. 

“Becoming popular with the children now, are you, Zhongli?” Childe jokes as he catches the man exiting the classroom, where a gaggle of children had, unsuccessfully, attempted to keep him with them for an hour more. “I’ll have you know, I’ll fight you back for that title.”

“I simply try to serve them with the respect they deserve as fellow learners on the journey of knowledge,” Zhongli smiles, behind a plastic cup filled with tepid water from the singular working watercooler in the school. 

“Haha, it could only work with you, now,” Childe says, leaning against one of the heavily-vandalised walls of the corridor— and does that say DR SUX COX on the wall? Man— Childe has to teach the children phonics better, if their spelling is this terrible. The allegation is debatable— as in, the Doctor only ever snogs Pantalone behind the men’s bathrooms when the school bell has rung for the end of last period, so none of the children should have known. Perhaps it is also the influence of the clothing that the Doctor wears— flamboyant, with the visor over his eyes, and the skinny jeans beneath his lab coat. 

Childe pauses in internally debating the Doctor’s sexuality to pay attention to Zhongli, who has begun a diatribe about one of his students who is clearly “very gifted”— Childe is pretty sure all she did in Childe’s class was throw paper aeroplanes and shoot spitballs, so he cannot determine the veracity of that statement, but if the man says so…

“You know,” Childe says, after a while, Zhongli having wrapped up his glowing commendation of students that Childe has not had the pleasure of having the full attention of in approximately forever, “you’re pretty talented, as a teacher, if you can get that kind of reaction out of them. How do you do it?”

“Ah,” Zhongli smiles, his lips creasing into a fond smile. “I used to head an… organisation, of sorts, that had me in a leadership position. Trying to attain the respect of people who were predisposed to being guarded, volatile, i learned many things. Furthermore… I have a son, and trying to get him to learn anything in his younger years was a bit of a… learning curve.”

Childe perks up at this. The affable Zhongli, of course, has a son. Does that mean he also has a wife, possibly? Or— Childe reminds himself, perhaps his situation is different. Things are different, in this country. 

Still, the thought of family comes to mind with a warm bubbling. He’s always been a family man— nurturing is baked into his bones, from his upbringing— and working in a school has been a good outlet for him. 

“His name is Xiao,” Zhongli says with a small smile, noticing Childe’s attention. “It’s a very unusual name, in my homeland, but at the time I was very enthralled with mythology and fantasy.” 

“What does it mean?” Childe cocks his head. He sounds the name out in his mind. Xiao. See-yau. Short syllable. Bit cute.

“A type of mountain demon,” Zhongli says, chuckling softly. “As I said, very unusual. But it’s said to be fiercely protective, and a great warrior. At the time, having a child— I wanted, perhaps hoped, for someone strong, full of fire and a defending nature.” 

“How old is he now?” Childe asks— in his mind, a child, perhaps? Zhongli looks young— though Zhongli had once joked that it is common for people from his homeland to look twenty when they are forty. 

“Ah, he’s a tween, now.” Zhongli laughs. “Very soft-spoken, and very clingy. I find it a blessing. At his age, many children withdraw from their parents, finding them boring.”

“Haha,” Childe says, “as a child, I certainly found the outside world more exciting than my home. Perhaps enough to get into too much trouble.”

His fingers tap against the wall as he speaks. Thinking about home too much gets him nervous. 

“Well,” Zhongli says, his eyes sparkling with mirth, “now you’re in charge of the troublemakers, so there’s karma, coming back around.”

He likes Zhongli, he decides.

—

Childe meets Zhongli’s wife, Guizhong, first when Zhongli brings her by for the staff’s usual end-of-year celebratory drinks at the local dive bar. She’s a lithe woman, all bones, even, and moves like even a wisp of wind could topple her over. She has pale skin and greying hair— not albinism, like what Arlecchino has. Apparently— and this comes to Guizhong’s second trait: her absolutely humorous nature— it’s a wig. She winks and slides it off her scalp, revealing a thin smattering of wispy hair cut close to the scalp underneath the thick wig of grey hair. 

She used to have breast cancer, she explains, with all the tact of a loose-lipped drunk man. She’s easygoing and free with her words, though they are coloured much more thickly with the accent that Childe knows Zhongli attempts to hide more. After a long string of chemotherapy appointments supplemented by three surgeries (which absolutely wrecked their meagre savings, she laments, though Zhongli wraps his arm around her and assures her that everything was worth it to have her safe and sound) she is for the first time in her life able to set aside the thought of doctor’s appointments, and instead— this is said with a cheeky tilt to her grin— load up on greasy bar snacks and shitty liqueur until she develops liver failure, too. 

“Don’t joke about that,” Zhongli grumbles, but there is a fond flush to his cheeks. Evidently, Zhongli loves his wife very much. Childe sighs, and wishes it was him, for just a moment. It used to be his dream— a family. A child, perhaps. Not necessarily from him, either. Adopted, maybe. Just… something of his own to protect. 

He puts it aside to continue joking with Guizhong about the fastest way to get absolutely hammered. 

She’s a frighteningly intellectual woman, and she quickly charms Pantalone with her quick hand with the more gnarly integrals the man usually reserves as a way to trounce his students and display dominance in the circle of life of calculus. Sandrone, too, is pulled into the easy orbit of Guizhong’s magnificent intuition with classical physics (“Pah, all students these days don’t appreciate a good classical physics problem!” is Sandrone’s common gripe. “They always fall half-asleep through electromagnetism lessons, too!”) and, quickly, they become fast friends advising each other on increasingly complicated wiring and electronic systems that Childe is frankly not equipped to understand. The old man Pulcinella, too, has a rare smile on his face as Guizhong lapses into a discussion with him on the finer points of human geography. 

By the end of the night, as their wallets become lighter (there is no other luxury they can afford to spend on, after all) and their livers become more overworked, Guizhong has thoroughly charmed the entire staff. 

“Your wife,” Childe says to Zhongli, their eyes trained on the woman, so small, petite, yet so magnificently bright and bigger than life, “is fucking amazing. How’d you score a woman like that, huh, Zhongli?”

Zhongli chuckles, and lifts his glass to his lips. He’s having water and diluted grape juice only, tonight, given he’s Guizhong’s "designated driver" — even if he doesn't own a car— and he would, as the man puts it, “Rather my wife gets home safely, especially on her first night having fun in a long time.” 

“Luck, mostly,” Zhongli says, eyes shimmering with the ghosts of memories. Childe knows that look— that look amongst his fellows, once they had long finished their mission, once they had been let go. Their duty fulfilled, and no one else knew that they had. “And, well, they say marriage is easy when your wife’s your best friend first.”

“Archons bless,” Childe laughs, and downs another watered-down shot. “Damn, Zhongli. There’s enough brains between the two of you to save the world if you put your mind to it.”

He means it, too. Zhongli has keen eyes and a measured temperament that allows him to tackle problem-solving with an almost impartial eye. His ability to recall and connect concepts across multiple disciplines thanks to his (Childe semi-regularly jokingly curses this) eidetic memory make him very versatile, as a teacher, as an academic. He takes difficult, winding concepts and sets them aright easily, pieces apart problems with such ease that nothing seems difficult to tackle beneath his calm, discerning eye. Guizhong, on the other hand, is full of passionate fire that is untempered by her illnesses and her constitution. She is all wild creativity, bouncing ideas off the wall at lightning speeds— her mind, too, moves fast as a bullet train, rocketing between ideas faster than the speed of light, and she comes to conclusions faster than anyone else. She is eager to learn and even more eager to compete, and not for dominance, competition for the sake of competition, for the sake of learning and inquisition itself, like an Enkanomiyan philosopher taken reincarnation into the modern-day. 

Together, Childe thinks, they are perfectly complementary, two halves of a whole. Like legs of a body, walking in unison without even thinking about it. Propelling to a brighter future. They should be in boardrooms, he thinks, research labs, chairing, co-presidents of some organisation that isn’t a run-down school in a run-down county in a run-down province. Why aren’t they? Of course— he knows the answer, but still. It feels unnatural, that such genius would descend upon the small suburb that Childe has hesitatingly called home for the better part of almost a decade. 

Still, the answer is clear. It is clear in the ringing, undulating tones of their accent, the locution of someone foreign. Not only that, it is the sound of a voice of someone from a country that was recently fractured into two, a country that has had its people running, out, anywhere, ending up here, two of them, sitting at a shitty dive bar, drinking shitty liqueur, instead of receiving prizes on a world stage. 

And somehow, this, this, is still the better place to be. 

It is a reality that all who come here must understand, after all. That despite everything, this was better. That despite the black mold on the ceiling and the rust in the taps, you must do everything to make it home because you cannot go home. That home will never be home again, that home has been conquered, commandeered to a future you will never be welcome in.

So when Zhongli replies: “Yes, it did feel like that sometimes, didn’t it? That somehow, if we just fought hard enough, we could save our world from anything.” — Childe understands. Childe understands it, deep in his bones, and it is this understanding that has him knocking Zhongli’s shoulder with a light fist and giving a lighthearted chuckle.

“At least you’re saving the kids’ worlds, if anything,” Childe says. “Being a teacher— maybe if you can’t save it, maybe they can.”

And it is then, he thinks, watching Guizhong dance drunkenly underneath fluorescent lighting, Sandrone on one arm, Pantalone on the other, without a care in the world, without thinking of term tests or passing grades or no-kid-left-behind-even-if-they-couldn’t-go-forward, that maybe he really finally believes what he is saying for the first time in several years. That it isn’t an empty platitude that he serves as a soothing balm to other world-weary teachers. That it’s hope. 

Funny, he allows himself a smile, as Zhongli hums out a reply. He looks radiant, even, beneath the unflattering, harsh dullness of the lights. His brown hair really does look like chocolate, and even the acne scars against the planes of his cheek seem like battle scars. His voice is deep and soothing. Childe thinks that maybe home might feel like home, soon. 

Funny, that it took so long, that it took maybe-almost-a-decade, for him to find it.

—

Zhongli fits neatly into the school’s ecosystem, as if he was always meant to be there, that it’s hard to imagine how life was like before it. 

Guizhong absolutely obliterates the system, in the sense that she changes it, in the sense that, as Childe read from a newspaper article several years ago, introducing wolves back into the overgrazed terrain of the valley of a state three days’ of a drive away had healed the land. In a sense that the grass grew back greener as Guizhong-the-wold nipped at the buds the overgrazing prey. 

Guizhong joins the school maybe two or three years after Zhongli, and they are already well-acquainted with her by then, but still, her official introduction feels like that of the wolves. Fierce, ready to change, but absolutely welcome.

She takes up Pulcinella’s old post as Geography teacher, allowing the poor man to rest his voice instead of rattling it as he attempts to corral teenagers with all the might of a man shorter than five feet. He happily returns to the secretarial and bookkeeping duties that he was hired for, and these days there is a pep in his step, too. 

“I think the school is too drab,” Guizhong says, on the very first lunch break.

“We all think that,” Arlecchino deadpans. “You are not the only one. We do not have the money for a renovation.”

“Who said anything about a full renovation?” Guizhong says, through two bites of an egg in her porridge that, as Childe had learnt in his attempt to steal one of Zhongli’s, is an acquired taste. Century egg, his foot, Childe had thought angrily. 

“I’m thinking we should have the students contribute a little. Like an art project.”

“With what supplies?” Childe laughs. 

“Anything,” she shrugs, “you’d be surprised how creative people can get with little on hand. Back home I made watercolour out of boxed fruit juice.”

It’s always like this, with the intrepid couple. They are not exactly tight-lipped about their lives in their homeland, but they rarely expand on it. They do, however, drop little trinkets, hints of who they used to be, that leave Childe curious and ashamed of his curiosity. Whatever it is, they clearly are trying to bury the hatchet, and digging up people’s pasts is not a pastime he would like to engage in, given that he himself would be averse to people looking too deeply into his. 

Still— the story he’s pieced together is intriguing. They lived in rough conditions, and they had many friends, a veritable network of people and contacts across the entirety of their homeland that they constantly conspired with to do various undescribed acts. They were spunky youth (Guizhong’s words, not his) with a proclivity for danger, which, given where they’ve ended up and how Zhongli gets a mournful look whenever probed too deeply about it, probably ended in disaster. 

Childe is familiar with world-ending disaster, himself. He has his fair share of mysteries. The rest of the staff are the same, too. A school jury-rigged together with duct tape and misfits. Everyone on staff has a mysterious unexplained past and a litany of mental and physical scars that they try to hide. Columbina’s gentleness with the special education children is always accompanied with an underlying sorrow, and her deep and intense worry for each single individual child can occasionally border on unhealthy for herself that feels almost like the ghost of a dead child haunts her footsteps. Arlecchino’s criminal record is far from spotless, and there is a part of her youth that was so terrible that the relevant case was under gag order and no one but the Tsaritsa knows what she did. 

So he understands. Yet— this is different. With Zhongli and Guizhong, it isn’t the understanding, the camaraderie, that he feels with the rest. It is starting to transform into a deep yearning, to reach into the picture and feel it with them. 

Instead, he says: “Well, we can see how to convince all these reluctant students first, then.”

—

He meets Xiao for the first time when Zhongli calls in sick for the first time, as well. Zhongli is usually the picture of perfect health. It is highly unusual for the man to fall sick, as diligent as he is with fulfilling his daily caloric and dietary needs even on a budget. Childe has long since fallen into the trap of instant noodles on the fly and coffee to ride out his candy sugar-highs. 

In fact, it is so highly unusual, that Childe feels a sort of inner urge to go over and check up on the man. 

Before he knows it, last period ends, and he finds Guizhong saying goodbye to the children, who have absorbed her infectious energy and might just know how many continents there are in the world by next week, a relief given that with Pulcinella’s age they might as well have assumed that all the world was still one supercontinent. 

“Hey,” he greets Guizhong. She’s much healthier, now, compared to his first meeting with her. Redness has returned to her cheeks and her wrists are no longer the circumference of toilet-paper tubes. “I was wondering— would you tell me where the two of you live? I want to give some soup for Zhongli.”

Guizhong practically lights up at the idea. “Oh, that’s splendid! I haven’t had the time to cook anything, and right now Xiao doesn’t know how to make anything except for almond tofu and eggs. Wait— let me write down the address.”

That’s what’s refreshing, about Guizhong. She barrels her way into any place, makes herself at home, and doesn’t apologise for her presence. She takes what she can get. According to Zhongli, she was known as extremely rude, in their homeland. According to Guizhong, nothing in life can be achieved if one does not seize every opportunity. Childe recently found out about the word that describes this life motto— carpe diem. He relishes in the opportunity to expand his vocabulary— an inner voice, despite all the years, still nags at him that he doesn’t quite speak like a native.

Childe practically flies home to cook, that day. His pots and pans greet him weakly after months of light use. The sad tomatoes in his fridge are given a breath of fresh air as he pureés them into soup stock. He chops up ingredients to sauté in the pan, before dumping them into the tall pot with spices, the pureé and water. He ruminates on meat choice: back home, he thinks idly (and ‘home’ in this case was not the apartment he existed in when school was out, but home, where he used to eat crepes on Maslenitsa and light fires at Krsnic Noc) that when he used to live by the sea, octopus was the go-to, for this, yet in this octopus is a luxury he hasn’t managed to ignore firewater long enough to buy, so in goes measly dried squid in the hopes that it tastes slightly similar and fishballs made from fish parts processed just long enough to be edible. 

By the end of it, it’s meagre fare, but it smells like home. The broth wafts a scent that hits his olfactory senses that pings the memory in his mind to bring forth what he has long kept down, down. It brings forth memories that he has pretended he never had. It brings forth copper hair just like his, bringing his nose down to nuzzle at the soft skin of a child swaddled in thick woven blankets, born at the height of winter, little Teucer, bare and untouched by the cruel winter in the arms of a loving mother, who he loved too little too late. 

What does it mean, he wonders, something heavy and dark and writhing curling in his gut, anticipatory, eager, as he trudges to Guizhong and Zhongli’s apartment. What does it mean, to give someone else, to give others, home? How do you tell them that you are giving them home, he thinks, staring at a door that is made of cement (the best fighting chance against the bullets that rest in the chamber of guns that everyone on the block on the street in the county carries), with faded red paper, a square rotated forty-five degrees into a diamond shape, calligraphied black brushstrokes wishing well-wishes (Zhongli had eagerly expanded into his foray into the craft, and Childe had listened, eagerly, wanting, as if he could, too, go back in time and beg his mother to teach him how to weave and sew lace like his ancestors did).

How does it feel, to find a stranger on the doorstep of your home offering his? 

It is then that he first meets Xiao. Zhongli’s son. The door had swung open carefully, the actions of a child who had been born wary and grown even warier. The child was gangly, now, growing into the height of a later-tween to early-teen, though he was not blessed with Zhongli’s genetics so much as of now, given that his height ended beneath Childe’s chest. 

He had a piercing stare, though— those amber eyes are definitely Zhongli’s. The kid has Guizhong’s original black hair, struck through with obviously self-dyed green streaks. It’s messy and long, like Zhongli’s, very long. It reaches to the kid’s back. The expression on the kid’s face is deadpan, but his shoulders are curled in, ready to strike.

Still, Childe has been a teacher for the better part of a decade-and-a-half by now, so he musters up his bestest, most winning smile, and cocks his head. “Hullo, do you know Mrs. Guizhong and Mr. Zhongli?”

The kid’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Childe holds his smile tentatively. Did he pronounce their names wrong?

Then— he seems to understand, as exasperation floods his features. Ah, yes. Childe did mispronounce their names, then. He must try harder.

“Yes,” the boy says, hesitant. His eyes flicker between the clear container of Childe’s signature seafood soup and Childe himself, a quick assessment. Judgement. At the hands of a teenager, it is terrifying. No matter how many times it occurs, in Childe’s opinion. “I am their son. Mama and Baba are inside, I shall call them.”

The son’s voice is clear, low, matching the tones of the majority populace in the province. He sounds born-and-bred here, nothing of his parent’s accented speech, even if Zhongli’s is practically nonexistent now. 

From behind, Guizhong emerges from the darkness of the hallway to place her hand on the kid’s shoulder. “No need, I see you’ve been acquainted with Childe already,” she grins, a sparkling smile.

“Xiao— this is Childe, a coworker.”

Then— Zhongli (Zhongli!) emerges from behind Guizhong, a little like a visual matroyshka doll, though Childe isn’t supposed to mention such things now, given that ‘Childe’ was never in that country to begin with. 

The man has a medical mask around his face, and his hair, instead of the low, long ponytail that Childe is accustomed with, is instead let loose, brown strands long and free, over his shoulders. Childe thinks he looks magnificent, even like this, like intelligence can be conferred through the windows of the soul called the bright amber eyes that are free from the obstruction of the mask.

“Hullo, Childe,” Zhongli greets, with a rough voice. Sweat damped his forehead.

“Baba, you should go in,” the kid had murmured. His body, Childe had noticed, angled away from Childe. Protection, he categorised, for a moment too slow to inhibit instincts he no longer needs. The kid is wary of him, and is using his body to physically separate his parents from Childe. It’s adorable, actually, and despite the prickly glare the kid is not hiding at all it still reminds Childe of the meaning of the kid’s name— Xiao, it was, wasn’t it? Protection. A mountain demon. Prickly and yet loving. It fits perfect for the kid in front of him.

Still, he had a goal, coming here, so, “Uh! Wait— before I go— I meant to bring some soup.” Childe  grins, holding the door. 

Xiao takes it gingerly, then brings it up for a sniff with a furrow of his brow.

“This smells like seafood soup,” Xiao says, an accusing glare levelled at Childe. “Baba…”

“—is fine with seafood soup,” Zhongli interjects. The man takes the container from Xiao, and lifts it up to smell. “Mmm,” he intones. “It smells lovely.”

“Are you sure, A-Li?” Guizhong asks. 

“Definitely,” Zhongli says, letting the container rest in his arms. He brings those striking amber eyes to Childe’s gaze. They are full of warmth as he says: “Thank you, Childe. Your gift is much appreciated. Feel free to come by anytime?”

“Oh, definitely,” Guizhong says, with a conniving gleam to her eyes that Childe can’t quite unpack. “Feel free to come by and visit Zhongli anytime, alright?”

“D-definitely,” Childe says, and weathered by the full force of the entire family’s gazes on him: one fond, one teasing, and one loathing (from the kid Childe swears he will wear down, he’s sure of it, all kids must love him!), he takes a step back and squeaks, before running down the corridor to the stairwell.

It is only until he reaches his apartment door that he realises that there has been a big, stupid grin on his face the whole time.

—

It goes like this, for the next few years— he, Guizhong and Zhongli are basically inseparable during lunch breaks, and Childe regularly gives his leftovers to them when he cooks too much in the cooking frenzies that become exponentially more frequent now that there is a willing receptacle (re: Zhongli) for his food. School years pass by in a tizzy, and with that, it feels like it has always been like this. Childe settles into a new normal, with the two by his side, like the friends he had always wished he had when he was younger. 

Guizhong’s idea of having the children contribute to beautifying efforts for the school have blossomed into something beautiful over the years— not everyone contributes, and no one is expected to, but those who do have created works of art that sprawl across the drab hallways. There are drawings made in crayon donated half-heartedly by the municipality that is put to good use by the children, and now there is a mural made by at least a hundred different children that spans the expanse of the wall, a cacophony of colours and concepts and objects that all hold some subtle reference Childe feels he is much too old to get, by now. It’s no classical work of art, but it does lend some colour to their school. Some of the parents have even commented on it. 

It feels like it has a reason to be here, now. Like there is some sort of draw to bring in children day in, day out, even when unsure whether anything they’re teaching them will go out into the world for good use. The Doctor’s chemistry lessons have often be put to nefarious use— though Childe doubts any of the teenager’s attempts to cook crystal meth have taken off, given the starting products are not stocked in bulk in their meagre laboratory and the equipment is jealously guarded by the Doctor (re: he takes it home for his own nefarious projects, school district rules be damned). 

Guizhong has settled in, not mellowed out, but her exuberance has made a home in the halls, has made the shitty paper plates for the school lunch into tectonic plates for the children, has decorated the Geography classroom with a litany of paper cranes and animals— an art she had perfected in the homeland, Zhongli tells Childe, watching his wife through one of the dirty windows into her classroom during their lunch break. It’s a neat art that Sandrone and Guizhong had eagerly discussed the use of in space-travel technology, practiced in the highest echelons of scientific research, not the dim physics labs, but still, it is used. She has a hand for craft, a nature that Zhongli laughs and says he does not, cannot replicate. Zhongli is a master orator, language is his tool and his memory is vast, his rhetorical expertise belays a life much different from the one he lives now. Guizhong cuts her sentences in half and stutters and stops again, inundated with a thousand and one ideas at once, brilliant yet occasionally incoherent, and it is with Zhongli’s skill in taking it slow that she manages to tell anything, sometimes. 

Her paper cranes don’t just lie in the wells of the donated plastic tables, or the top of the whiteboards. They fly themselves to the ‘lounge’, where their bright-coloured plumage brings the grey of the room to its knees, and they fly themselves atop every single on of their teacher’s desks, coloured paper torn from magazines and newspapers, printed photographs of presidents far away somehow folded into something of their colours. Arlecchino gets a crane cut from the picture of a sunset, harsh red on black. The surly gym teacher does not mention it, but she clearly adores it, and on her cellphone’s lock screen is her and Columbina’s little pink crane nestled together into a makeshift exam-paper nest. 

Pantalone smiles when he receives one cut from a picture of piles of gold coins, his eyes shining. The Doctor huffs in approval when Guizhong makes him a poison-green crane. Even the old man ‘Nella gets one, pure white. Her Majesty even dares to break her icy countenance enough for a little approved nod when she receives hers, igloos in a far-off northern land printed across on hers. 

When Childe receives his, though, he’s blown away by its sheer artistry.

This one’s not just from me, Guizhong writes (she communicates most often in Post-Its, to crystallise her thoughts instead of rambling out), since you’re a special friend of ours, Zhongli decided to include a little gift too. ;)

He receives a paper crane that’s been carefully folded from the orange of a hearth-fire. Its wings are a little crooked, but it is beautiful and fits neatly in his palms, like the fish he used to let swim in them when the world was bright and cold, and his father’s guiding hand was at his back. He spies, on its wings, in tiny, calligraphied script, is a poem. 

Not only that— the script is not the one he has been teaching to children for almost fifteen years. It is not even Zhongli’s own native one, logographic, square-like, boxed in, yet flowing. It is his own. The one from Before— and the words are, too. They dance into his vision, begging, pleading, and they draw out from his eyes tears that have long since waited to burst.

How did Zhongli know? Childe has trained, studied, practiced— to erase the past, to follow his last directive to go out into the distance never to be seen in that place again. To forget home was home. And yet, here it is, chasing him in the form of a man with too-bright eyes and too-knowing smile, his hand steady as he wrote a script in a language that, despite Childe’s best efforts, he cannot forget, will never forget. It is burnt into his bones like Guizhong’s paper-folding art is, it has forged a scar into his memory and will not leave until they day he dies, even as he lies down at night, wishing, hoping, that he will finally see the ceiling that he sees at night, peeling with plaster, as home. Even when home wasn’t dingy suburb in a city that doesn’t know him, but hearthfire in the deepest, coldest night, the woods just in his backyard beckoning adventure, the scent of broth stewing with beetroots and potatoes and mother’s love, as cliché as it sounds. 

His fingers trace the poem as his mouth sounds out what has never been said for a decade and a half, and he’s spent the same amount of time in this country as the time he had taken to get restless enough to go foolishly seeking adventure, never knowing that it would take him away from his homeland and never let him rest, and it feels like coming home, if home can be a paper crane torn out from newspaper and poetry written in drying cheap ballpoint pen ink.

He keeps the crane, next to him, at all times. It carves home into his front pocket, set onto his desk as he marks papers, set next to his nightstand, knowing, that somehow, he has found two people that have dug up home and gave it back to him, however little, even when they couldn’t do it for themselves.

—

So he settles, easily. Guizhong and Zhongli always feel open, and he is accepted into their fold, and he spends lunch breaks with them, and he accompanies Guizhong home when Zhongli’s swamped with work, and they sing along to staticky radio rock songs as his beat up Aquabus car stutters its way on the potholed roads down to the apartments where she and Zhongli stay. Sometimes Zhongli has to rush over to his son’s school to sort out an issue, and given that the man doesn’t own a car (he walks, most of the time) Childe smiles, revs up his engine, lets his kids take an off-day as he sets ‘Nella to supervise them. It’s always a fun time, Zhongli riding shotgun as the man keeps a prim and proper appearance even as they go across bumpy roads. The man also has a healthy appreciation for heavy metal, so Childe slides in a CD he bought from a band back before they went big, and they are serenaded by the syncopation of the big bass drums as they ride the way to Xiao’s school. 

It’s easy, slipping into their life: Zhongli tests recipes from their homeland on vegetables that don’t quite fit right, but they make it work, and Childe and Zhongli swap recipes on soups and sauces that they’ve managed to cobble together on a tight budget. Childe saves up to buy enough fresh fruit to make kompot (back home, they plucked them ripe right off the tree in their backyard, but there’s no way to grow a tree in an apartment) and he bottles them into old pickle jars. The smile that lights up Zhongli’s face as he tastes it is well worth the hours of careful monitoring of the pot, just in case his apartment’s shitty gas fixture decides to leak or explode or something similar just because he overextended the gas stove. They pour it into the shitty plastic cups and drink it hot and close to scalding, sweetness spilling down their throats, and its beautiful. Everything about it is, to be with them, he almost forgets monotony’s existence.

He lives for the in-between of periods, where Zhongli would slip out of the classroom to top up his water bottle, and they lean against the corridors chatting. Childe learns more, so much, about Xiao, growing steadily into a surly teenager, he spies the boy in between visits to their home, and the boy always has a glare etched permanently into his brow, now, as if Childe has come into their home and upended his entire life. Childe understands— what it’s like, to be dissatisfied with the way things are. To feel like your life has been invaded by that which has shifted your life trajectory elsewhere. He’s too old for such thoughts, now, before, he floated by, now, perhaps, with the anchors of Guizhong and Zhongli they seem so far away. His quality of life seems to matter none when he spends half of it with them. 

And so it is, that he never notices, as always, that something is slipping out of his fingers, because he never does. That’s how life works— childhood dreams, hopes, all steadily fading without you noticing, until one day, you notice it is gone, but you never saw it put on its shoes, never saw it wring its hands nervously looking at the time, never noticed it until it was at the door and saying goodbye. That’s how all things are, because once again, it happens.

Zhongli comes in alone, on that fateful spring day. Winter has just melted away into an awkward cold warmth with Spring, and Zhongli had hung up long rolls of red parchment at his apartment door with calligraphied couplets for a New Year that only he and Guizhong know how to celebrate. Still, Childe had tried, anyway, after a fitful internet search he had appeared with a bag of dried candied orange peels at their doorstep— the species of citrus that the internet had suggested is nowhere to be found in the markets, and archons know that Childe has no money to go to one of those fancy imported fruit stores, so he appears, anyway. 

Zhongli had laughed, at the time, with Guizhong, and he had taken the candied orange peel with a winning smile, invited Childe into their house, and pressed into his hands clumsily-pressed dumplings and too-sticky rice cakes that Childe chews down with vigour (he had learnt at an early age that food was scarce and every opportunity to have it should be taken). They’re in a particularly festive mood that no one else seems to share— but that’s okay, they assure, because Childe is here. He doesn’t understand how his presence has made it alright, but he thinks that they shouldn’t have to celebrate alone, so he promises that next year, he’ll come by again, and apologises that he didn’t search up the holiday sooner, or he would have come in the years before. Maybe with the advance awareness he can save up so his budget allows a trip to the local imported goods stores and get them some of the accurate stuff. 

He had promised. Next year, even, he says, winking to Xiao, who only grumbles as he is acknowledged, now, he might bring a red packet for Xiao. It’s not in his budget this year, but Zhongli and Guizhong only deserve the best things, and if this can be home for them, then next year Childe’ll show up with a red packet and some of the actual oranges. 

He promised, of course, but despite everything the world hates (and has always hated) Childe keeping his promises. He promises to Guizhong that next year he’ll convince ‘Nella to organise a small celebration in the school, like their Yuletide one, and then maybe she can see home in her new one, next year. 

It never does get fulfilled, because on that fateful spring day, Zhongli walks in alone. Guizhong, perennially next to him, an evergreen partnership, is conspicuously absent. 

The second thing that Childe notices is that the normal affable Zhongli has a downcast expression broadcasted right across his face. There is sorrow in his eyes, deep. He is worried, too, a little twitchy, compared to his usual composure. They all notice it, of course. But it is Childe that feels, deep in his gut, the forewarning to a terrible string of events. And Childe’s gut is always, unfortunately, an accurate prophet to his future. 

“How’s Guizhong?” Childe tries, in their usual inter-period break. Zhongli is distant, eyes surveying the work of the students, guided by Guizhong, multicoloured crayon and poster paint lines streaked across, a mural of a thousand things, yet behind it there is that spark that Guizhong brings to all her projects. 

It takes a moment for Zhongli to answer. This, in of itself, is not unusual. Zhongli always thinks over his answers very carefully. But this silence is almost deafening, as if the normally loquacious Zhongli was for once lost for words.

“Zhongli?” Childe tries again, reaching out a hand to clasp at Zhongli’s shoulder in a display of meagre comfort. “Are you alright?”

At this— Zhongli seems to melt beneath Childe’s hand, a week’s worth of tension spilling over and out, and the man throws back his head in a careless manner most unusual of him and sighs. 

“Childe,” Zhongli starts, his eyes trained upwards, Childe wonders what on the ceiling is so fascinating. Zhongli’s long fingers have found their way to Childe’s, and he feels his hands gripped with a frightening strength that reminds him that Zhongli’s former life was probably one of toil, as well, from the scraps of history he gets when Zhongli feels comfortable to share, once in a blue moon. Zhongli’s hand is shaking in his, trembling, alike the murmur of the rattling components in the boot of his car. “Childe,” Zhongli says again, and it sounds more like a plea than an address, this time, and when Childe looks, really looks, at Zhongli, there is redness in his eyes, and the man has a desperate look to him. 

“Is everything alright?” Childe murmurs, coming closer. “I promise— I won’t tell anyone. And if you don’t want to tell, I’ll still be here. We can just— we can just, exist here. I’ll tell the kids you feel unwell. Do you want to go home?”

“No,” Zhongli says, and tears do not fall, because after years of a friendship Childe has learnt that Zhongli has not, cannot cry. That he is a porcelain jar, hard surface, filled up to the brim with tears he can never shed. But there is a waver to his voice. “I cannot go home, Childe, I cannot.” 

“Why not?” Childe asks, gently, gently, because he is realising, quickly, that Zhongli is not hard stone unyielding, that he’s tempered glass with a single fault ready to shatter, and Childe must handle with care. “Please, Zhongli, what can I do for you?”

“I can’t—” Zhongli chokes, his hand a vice grip around Childe’s, now, “I can’t go home, because— if I go home, A-Xiao, he’ll ask, he’ll ask too many questions, and I cannot answer, Childe, because if I answer that means that it is real, and I cannot… not after so many of the rest…” 

“Did something happen?” Childe asks, and they’re on the floor, now, Zhongli is retreating into himself, and Childe is crouched next to him, close, and wondering why on earth the universe is trusting him with something so fragile and beautiful again, as if he isn’t going to break it, as if he has a good track record with people who trust him. Still, if no one else can do it, he has to, so he presses, grips Zhongli’s hand back with the strength he had preserved, frozen in time when he was another person, another person entirely, gripping a gun, holding on, gripping obstacle courses and walls and gripping into a fist to punch out, and now, it is for comfort, instead, not war. 

“Guizhong relapsed,” Zhongli says hoarsely. Two simple words— it completely shatters Childe’s world as well.

“She relapsed?” Childe asks. He doesn’t ask the usual questions. The how? How did she relapse? Did the doctors lie? How did it come to this, that it would come back to strike her? He doesn’t ask any of that. Instead, he asks— 

“How long?” He croaks. Because despite everything he is still frighteningly capable of compartmentalising death. Of compartmentalising life itself, distilling himself into a thousand separate people. It is why they hired him in the first place. He was able to wade into blood and come out the next hour unfazed, play the role of a perfect big brother without any issue. 

“We don’t know,” Zhongli hiccups, “we thought she was better. They said she was. But then she started collapsing in the evenings and losing hair all over again, and she said, you know how she is— she said it was like seeing an old friend come to visit. The feeling in your soul that you just know who they are, even if they’ve changed their makeup and their clothing and their life.”

“Take it one step at a time,” Childe says, and he’s reeling on the inside but he’s still so good at hiding it. Because he knows that once again he is too late, that once again he doesn’t know how good he’s got till he’s on the verge of losing it. “One day. Day by day. You haven’t lost her now.”

“She’s the last one, Childe,” Zhongli says instead. “All those years ago, you don’t understand, when she finally came into the pink of health I was ecstatic, but selfishly. It wasn’t for her, it was for me, that she stayed alive, that I felt so happy because my loneliness was delayed. She’s the last one and soon I’ll be the only one left who knew anything about what we tried to do, what we hid, the people and memories that were sent with us on that journey here.”

There’s nothing to say about this, except, I know, Childe realises. What else can he say? It won’t happen? Fate is a cruel mistress and though she missed once she might not miss twice. That if it’s gotten this bad that it’s might not get better. At that stage he would be writing wills and farewell letters. But Guizhong’s neither of them— Guizhong’s light, she is the sun on a cold winter day, and it’s nothing like the slow passing of a bachelor with no family, quiet and alone. It’s the death of someone whose hands will haunt the school halls, whose laughter will become entombed in the classrooms. Guizhong had brought warmth to the icy palace of Her Majesty, but it would quickly become cinders and cold ashes, once she was gone. 

There’s nothing to say, except, I know, what it feels like to be the only one who knew everything, to be the one to keep a secret to your breast until the scarce few who knew drop dead like flies. To be the one who got away, to be the one to sew one’s own mouth shut until it never seemed like one knew anything. 

So he says it, in a low voice. He understands— he always has, he realises, that Zhongli has always been easy to understand, and that is because both of them have secrets too large to bear and load-bearing pasts to keep. He realises that it isn’t just that, that it’s the feeling of wanting home so badly, yet home will not greet you back, to realise that everything you do is just a pale imitation to mirror what you have lost. 

When he’s done— in place is a large, too-large, acceptance that weighs deep in their hearts and guts, so they just sit awkwardly, facing the wall that Guizhong had led, watching the evening sun set the drawings alight with orange fire, and then after, Childe drives Zhongli in his Aquabus to the local hospital, and they put in a CD as always, and this time, their heartbeats go faster even than the crash of cymbals and drums. Zhongli still cannot cry, but Childe understands. 

Crying is for those who have not had to harden their hearts to march forward.

—

Guizhong grows sicker, over the course of the school year. By winter she has left her teaching position, to the great sadness of her students, and ‘Nella returns to their great disdain. The staff visit her as often as they can, still, but it gets disheartening, for with every visit it only seems that the number of tubes and high-pitched machines increase, and Guizhong slowly loses what little fat and roundness she had gained in her healthy years until she returns to the gaunt and wispy lady that he met all those years ago. Zhongli continues working to support his family, but he is greatly withdrawn, and slowly the grey returns to the school, creeping into it, until it really feels like the winter palace again. 

It seems unfair, Childe thinks, as he fiddles with the cover of a container of Guizhong’s favourite egg soup, cut with chives, a staple from her culture, taught once to him in happier days, Zhongli watching over him in their tiny kitchenette, orange lights, Zhongli’s guiding hand on his. It seems unfair that the people like him, broken and grey and desperate, are the ones that get to live, while the mini-suns of the world like Guizhong withered away. 

He doesn’t say any of this to Guizhong as he steps into the ward where she spends most of her days, now. She doesn’t deserve such morose thoughts. He shoves the thoughts away, he is good at that, after all, all he’s good for, to flash a brighter, warmer smile. It’s matched by hers, and it is a testament to her brilliance that even as her lips are pale and cracking, the blue of her veins showing beneath almost translucently thin skin, her smile is still brighter. Some people are just like that, he thinks. In her, sometimes, he sees copper hair instead of grey wig, hears the light, fluttering voice of a weak child calling out for his big brother. The world is unfair. 

“Hey, Guizhong. Brought your favourite soup,” Childe says, not mentioning anything at all about the new plastic tubing that runs from her wrists to an IV drip, nor how her scent has turned sour, when she started having to be sponge bathed instead of being able to shower herself. He doesn’t mention it at all, because her just being here, day after day, is already a miracle in of itself. “Zhongli says he’s sorry he couldn’t come by, but he’s sent you another one of his new poems.”

Zhongli writes an astounding amount of poetry, now, and unlike previously, he never elaborates on them. The sorrow that drips through the ballpoint pen ink is enough to convey his feelings, to Childe, anyway. These aren’t sad poems, though. Zhongli keeps those hidden away from Guizhong now, they sit at his desk in school instead of at home. The poetry he sends to Guizhong is of abstract scenes, flowers and clouds and swallows and moons, all flowery and pretty, of a land both of them share but have not been to in a long time, now. It feels as distant, as if Zhongli is desperately trying to lead Guizhong away into a land of forgetfulness, where the cancer spreading its way through her organs isn’t slowly killing her. 

“The silly boy,” Guizhong says. She never seems fazed, by her condition. By all means she is the same Guizhong as ever. Occasionally tactless, easygoing, free with her words and brightly brash. Like the sun, she never ceases shining. It is just the clouds that darken the sky, the knowledge that death looms. “He’s so sweet. You too, you’re always coming here, what for? Don’t you have work to do?”

“Just to keep you company,” Childe says, “Zhongli gets worried when you’re alone, and he gets so morose I can’t help but promise him all sorts of things. Your husband could charm the fur off a cat with that pout.”

In truth, he’s here because he’s terrified, too. That one day she might just be gone, like that.

“Both of you,” Guizhong giggles. “Take care of each other when I’m gone, okay?”

She’s like that— so blasé with her own approaching nonexistence. As if it would just be another day, as if the sun would continue rising in the sky and the earth rotating around it. As if her complete decay won’t set their orbits breaking apart, until they dance around a broken corpse of a star, coming closer and closer to their own destruction.

“It won’t be the same without you,” Childe murmurs. “I’m just a friend. You’re his wife.”

Guizhong rolls her eyes. “Not for long, I won’t.” She says it as if the sky is blue, the grass is green, and Zhongli will soon be marked as single on tax filing. 

“Don’t say such things,” Childe sighs, “you’ll only make him sadder. Stay alive, please?”

Guizhong has a glint in her eyes— she always seems to know something Zhongli and Childe don’t, bumbling men they are lost without a torch to guide them. Unknowingly, Childe has become a moth in Zhongli’s image, fluttering round the moon, that will soon fade out. 

“Alright,” she says instead, “I suppose there is a reason to continue living, isn’t there? My passport is going to get approved, soon. After so long, I can finally say I’m a citizen!”

They’ve talked extensively about the passport. Guizhong and Zhongli have struggled for many years to get that citizenship— it opened new possibilities, subsidized healthcare, for Guizhong, better schools for Xiao, more opportunities. It’s been a tumultuous process, but now, they are on the cusp of it— once they get their new passports, they’ll be citizens. 

“You better stay alive until then,” Childe says, and Guizhong grins at him back so ebulliently that Childe remembers it long after the day, when there is nothing of Guizhong but pictures.

She never got to see that passport, in the end.

—

Guizhong’s last day on earth never felt like it. The sun was brilliant, shining. The clouds were light and unburdened. Yet it still felt terribly wrong, but as Zhongli and Childe stood vigil as Guizhong’s breaths became laboured, they didn’t know why yet.

They don’t know it, but they hear her last words, that day.

“Come’ere,” Guizhong laughs, drawing them both close to her, twin lost children. “Come on, it’ll all be okay. We’re getting our passports tomorrow, A-Li. Our passports. Think about it.”

She shuts her eyes more and more, now, weariness easily sapping her bones. But she is still so bright, so bright, that it blinds them from the truth until it is too late. But then, they didn’t think about it. Instead, they let her guide them through dreamy lands— “How about we take a road trip, A-Li, once I get better? You too, Childe, and then you and Zhongli can go make out in the backseat while I go and abuse Childe’s Aquabus.” 

She is free and easy with her jokes, as always. She’s always teasing him and Zhongli, asking them when they’d just kiss already, since they were already joined at the hip, and Zhongli only ducks his head away to hide a blush, each time, while Childe laughs it off and assures he’s no homewrecker. They’re just friends, they both affirm. Guizhong drawls out a sure… every time. She’s more invested in getting them together than anyone else. Childe never dares. Even if she was open to it— Childe is all broken edges. He enjoys their company, but he would never dare think of bringing his broken self into their family, so perfect. 

This time, though, it doesn’t feel like she’s joking at all.

“Come on, Guizhong,” Childe laughs it off, “I would never dare steal your husband.”

Guizhong barks a laugh, and then says: “You know what, I’m done with this. I’m telling him, A-Li, he’s just too adorably clueless for his own good.”

Zhongli sighs and rubs his forehead. “I never intended to hide it. You just never mentioned it and confused Childe.”

“What?” Childe asks, eyes darting between them.

“Okay, fuck it,” Guizhong says, (she eagerly uses curse words off-duty, once Childe had taught her how, long ago). “You can kiss my husband, Childe. I’m serious. I wouldn’t mind.”

Childe flushes, deep, hot, rising to his cheeks. “This— this is a joke, right?”

She groans, exasperated, and wrings her hands, before taking her tiny hands and dragging Childe forward by the face. “No! I am not joking! I am fine with you kissing Zhongli. Actually, I would rather you get together now, because the pining has been painful to watch!” 

Later on, Childe will realise that this was her way of tying up loose ends, knowing she was to fade away soon. She had wanted to assure of their happiness, knowing she would be gone. But at the moment, he hadn’t realised it.

“A-are you sure?” Childe asks, awkward. “I mean— not that I — me and Zhongli— uh—”

“Oh my archons,” Guizhong groans, “Zhongli, come over here and confess to this disaster already.”

“Guizhong!” Zhongli hisses, “don’t fluster him!”

“Chop chop,” she says, “before I do the honours myself and shove the two of you together.”

“Zhongli,” Childe stutters, for the first time in years, as if he was fresh off the boat once more, “is she right? Do you really… like me?”

It sounds so juvenile, like one of the kids confessing to another after class on Valentine’s. He’s nearing the beginning of old age, and he’s weary and tired, and yet a single spark of hope dances its way through his heart.

“I do,” Zhongli smiles, small and bright, and something settles into Childe, like it feels right, like it’s releasing what he has kept inside. “I think you’re absolutely radiant.”

“Finally!” Guizhong shouts, and there’s contentment playing on her lips, one that Childe later realises is relief, is relief at the understanding that the two people she loves will be able to continue on without her. 

“Are you sure this is alright?” Childe asks, again, turning to Guizhong. “I mean— like, I’m really fine with staying friends, and like—”

“Take care of my husband, you silly man,” Guizhong chuckles, her hand brushing against Childe’s shoulder. “You’re perfect for each other. My blockheads. You can go kiss him, it’s fine, he’s fine with it, and anyway he never minded when I was snogging Ping back home, so it’s alright.”

“I mean— it’s different— you have a child, and everything,” Childe rambles, he still cannot believe that he’s been given permission to— it feels so indecent! 

“He’s very good at that, too,” Guizhong winks, and Childe practically dies inside, over again, when Zhongli decides he’s done with banter and tilts Childe’s chin beneath his long, spindly fingers. 

“H-hey,” Childe says, trapped between two of the most beautiful, smart, intelligent people he’s ever met, Zhongli’s warm body against his, and look at that, they fit perfectly together, Zhongli’s hand coming up to his waist. “Are you gonna kiss me?”

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” Zhongli says, golden eyes glimmering, and then their lips meet. 

The kiss is warm and feels like home, Childe thinks, like wading in pools of fish and eating borsch next to the hearth and Guizhong’s hands on his shoulder, light and delicate, feel like Teucer’s, back in the day, before everything went to shit. Zhongli’s lips are plush and Childe takes a gander at a gamble he has never dared, but now he does, Guizhong’s guiding hands on him, supporting, pushing him forward, Zhongli’s hand gripping his waist fiercely, pulling him closer, and there is nothing but the three of them, beautiful and eternal, and he is the tides, of the ocean, pulled in by the moon in front of him, with long brown hair down his back and lean muscle in the arms surrounding him, and he is warmed by the sun, bright and burning fast behind him, and he is, for a moment, just that— at home.

It is the first and last time Guizhong ever sees them kiss. 

When Zhongli and Childe reluctantly pull away from Guizhong’s ward, at the hospital, a new understanding between them, hope thrumming in their hearts, the sun is bright and jubilant still, yet dipping low into the horizon, red-orange-carmine, a last hurrah of colour before it, Guizhong, sets, dies. 

They get the call just when Childe pulls into the small alley right next to Zhongli’s apartment.

Zhongli’s hands have been playing at his lap the entire time— but when the phone rings, they simultaneously freeze. The world stops, maybe, but it doesn’t, because through the line of apartment blocks that cut through the horizon, there is a sliver of sky, and the last of the sun’s rays slip through the cracks as the world behind them turns dark, and it is movement, continuous, changing, even as it feels like nothing should. 

At six fifty-five post meridiem, Guizhong passes away, and the doctors said that she had passed with a smile on her face, bright even in her last moments.

Childe parks the car in the dingy alleyway, and Zhongli hiccups into his shoulders. No tears fall, because they cannot. Both of them have trained tears out of their eyes, and for the first time, it doesn’t feel worth it.

—

Childe comes to the wake— everyone does. Her Majesty had encouraged them to use the school for it. It’s a good choice: many of the students who Guizhong had moved the hearts of come pouring in, older, wiser, and it’s one thing to know about Guizhong’s magnetic draw, it’s another thing entirely to witness it, how she pulled people into her orbit and sent them flying out like magnificent comets streaking colour through the sky. Everyone thinks fondly of Guizhong, and everyone was sad to see her go. By the end of the reception there are hundreds of bouquets cobbled together with materials from cellophane paper to cardboard. The flowers aren’t real— too expensive— but they are all crafted with the artistry that they all knew Guizhong would have loved. Chief in the bouquets are the floral arrangements made out of folded newspaper, just like the paper-folding art Guizhong spread across the school. It is multiplied tenfold, hundredfold, back, colourful chaos placed at the table where Guizhong is printed in black-and-white, framed, incense lit and flickering next to her, wafting a sweet, floral scent of lilies. 

“That stupid woman,” Sandrone is later found saying, her eyes obscured by thick sunglasses, though Childe can spot the trail of tears down her cheek, “I told her to stay alive. I had one last project to show her. She would have loved it.” 

“I’ve never seen students so attached to a teacher before,” Columbina says softly. 

“She made our school vibrant like never before,” Her Majesty says, eyes trailing over the flowers drowning the table. “Someone like her is a once-in-a-lifetime miracle to meet.”

The potent sense of loss is difficult to describe— as if the world itself has failed in its tenets, that perhaps the sun should stop rising. 

Zhongli’s son, Xiao, has sequestered himself to a corner at the wake, the kid sullen, withdrawn. A hoodie is drawn up over his face, and his head is tilted back, eyes away from everyone else. He’s pressed up against a wall as if he needs it to keep himself from falling, as if he’s trying to flatten himself into nothingness. There’s red rimming his eyes— his mother is gone, after all. He’s grown into a lanky teenager, perhaps even leaving that demographic soon, but he still has Guizhong’s unfortunate height restriction. The messy green streaks in his hair seem freshly dyed, and the jagged edges of his newly-short hair are unkempt and uneven. 

“You good, kid?” Childe asks awkwardly. 

“Fuck off,” Xiao spits. 

“It’s alright, you know,” Childe says. “We all miss her.” 

“I know your angle,” Xiao says, with derision in his eyes. “I know how you look at Baba. In two weeks you’ll be invading our house and in three you’ll be married. Are you happy now? Your crush’s fuckass wife is dead so you can slide in without being called a homewrecker.”

“Xiao,” another stern voice cuts in. It’s Zhongli, a frown in his brow. “Don’t be rude.”

“He wants to replace Mama,” Xiao shoots back. “You can’t just let him–”

“Childe’s a family friend, and he’s done nothing but support me and your Mama,” Zhongli scolds. “Now apologise.”

“You don’t even care about Mama,” Xiao says, lower, his eyes trained on Zhongli. “She’s dead and you’re out here defending this– this man.”

“It’s okay, Zhongli,” Childe says, placing a hand out to push Zhongli away, the man’s shoulders tight in anger. “It’s okay. I understand how he feels. It’s only been a day, Zhongli, give it some time.”

Zhongli sucks in a terse breath, but at Childe’s silent assurance via his gaze, he backs down. His eyes flick between the still-irate Xiao and Childe.

"It's his birthday," Zhongli whispers, "today."

Oh. Xiao's lost his mother right before he could even grow into his next year of life.

It shouldn’t be a choice, even, Childe thinks. He’s just a family friend, kissing Zhongli aside. Xiao’s his son. 

“Go, be with Xiao,” Childe murmurs, placing a hand on Zhongli’s shoulder. “He’s having a hard time. Call me later?”

There is stress painted into every crease of Zhongli’s face. Childe is useless, has always been fucking useless in situations like these, because he’s so good at compartmentalising that even when one of his best friend dies, leaves his world forever, no tears grace his face. Everyone except him is sobbing their eyes out, and he wades in the waterworks and touches his cheeks and they are dry as desert. His heart pounds in his ears and his world feels like it’s been balancing precariously on a rocking horse, but he walks just fine and there are no tears in his eyes. It’s what made him a perfect soldier, you see, that hurt and grief could be put aside and he could maneuver out of situations that most would start breaking down in. 

So for the rest of the wake, he keeps a watchful eye on the pair, while keeping steadily off to the side.

Later on, he has a birthday cake delivered to Zhongli's apartment. Vanilla, sponge, light and sweet. Topped with almonds. Just like Xiao likes his desserts.

He doesn't bother leaving a card.

—

Fragile and beautiful Spring breaks into a sweltering Summer, in the months that pass by after Guizhong. That’s how time works, now, navigating through the hallways and seeing trails of her throughout the walls, colour and brightness slowly fading away in the summer heat. Before Guizhong and After Guizhong. That’s how life seems to be categorised, into, for him. He keeps turning to his right during lunch breaks expecting to see a head of grey wig-hair and a bright smile, only to find silence next to him ringing in his ears. Sometimes as he waits for Zhongli to arrive to school he keeps expecting to find another next to him, stepping into the school in tandem, laughing, beautiful. 

The world isn’t grey, after her death. It’s almost painfully bright. The new students that filter into the school know nothing about Guizhong, considering the painted walls just another feature, instead of a moment that had introduced the concept of colour back into the school. They laugh just fine, they joke just fine. They snort their noses gossiping about Pulcinella’s drab lectures while never knowing there was someone once there, who could have taken their hands and shown them a new world of beauty. The older ones carry a certain air of mourning, but as it is with youth, memories are ephemeral, and people equally so. For now, they’ve put it out of their minds, working, working, because they are young and the only thing important is to move forward.

Childe realises he’s grown older when he returns to his apartment and finds himself curled up on the bed unable to tolerate the growing sense of absence that permeates around him. It’s stupid, really — Guizhong had never been to his apartment before. It’s a glorified bachelor pad that he was far too embarrassed to let her and Zhongli into. He’s been living in it for more than a decade and there’s nothing to show for it except a cactus he replaces every year because he just can’t keep it alive, and a singular sad rug that vaguely reminds him of home. It’s drab and grey and it’s always been that way, except, for the first time in a long while, he can’t live with it. The bed has always been cold, but now, its chill seems to torment his nerves. 

It is the sensation of a sudden realisation of just what he has been living in for a decade and a half more. His mind giving up on maintaining the ignorance that allowed him to stave off all the feelings he reasoned he had no time and energy to untangle. After a decade and a half of collapsing on the bed and forgetting about just how terrible his living space was, his mind had finally decided enough was enough. Confront just how fucked up his life is.

The pillow is flat as always but now it feels downright limp, with too much give and not enough cushioning, and his blanket is too-thin and coarse against his skin, and the bed is cold while the air is muggy thanks to the shitty ventilation of his room, unrelieved by his half-lagging ceiling fan. And these are all completely material complaints, and he’s slept on far worse, he tries to reason, but perhaps everything has built up to a point where worse has plateaued out into a flat baseline over the years, until even escalation doesn’t quite feel alarming, until the last thing is placed atop his tower of regrets and grievances, and now, now—

—now that lack is hollowing out a cavity in his chest, and he touches it and wonders when it all started. Why is he noticing it now? That he has— nothing. He’s just puppeteering his flesh sack through life. Surviving, not thriving. But despite everything even though living suddenly becomes like trying to wade through tar he is too much of a coward to end it all. Stubborn fool he is, unable to let go of what got him into this whole mess, his inability to give up and die. 

He doesn’t cry, he cannot, but he’s gripping the thin ratty sheets and his knuckles are bleaching white from the tension, and he’s gritting his teeth, because right now, right now, he wonders when wonder had turned into wallowing, when it had all smoothed out into apathy. He definitely didn’t dream of this life as a kid. Maybe he really should have told himself to give up, because holding on to the people you love only works if they’re alive to be held on to. But he’s long past that, now, now he’s alive even though those who had once been his reason have died. And what’s the point? What’s the goddamn point? And yet as he says this, wants, he wants, oh does he want! He’s gripping at his sheets like it’s their arms, as if to say, stay a little longer, don’t fucking go. And the bed is cold and he wants warmth. And apathy is struggling to hold on in the face of the trench of sheer need, because he can’t say fuck-it-whatever and coast through his life without feeling, because he can’t. Whatever Guizhong and Zhongli have done, they’ve peeled his apathy back and now, now he can’t even put it back on. 

He wants. So, so badly. Wants more than anything. He hasn’t felt want in so long, but now that he’s learnt loss he has learnt want, again. And he hasn’t felt want in so long, and it’s heady and it makes him dizzy, and his head is spinning and up in the sky, and there’s a singular direction his body takes as his want takes him by the hand and drags him to that destination, and before he knows it—

—he presses call. 

“Childe?” Zhongli’s voice comes choppy through the receiver. It’s hoarse. He’s been asleep.

“Fuck, fuck, I’m so sorry,” Childe rambles, “this was a mistake, I’m sorry, it’s one a.m. I shouldn’t disturb you and — fuck I’ll just end the call right here — go back to sleep, Zhongli—”

In the background, the sounds of sheets shifting. “No, no— I can stay on the line,” Zhongli murmurs, “it’s okay, Childe. Besides…”

A pause. Childe’s finger is still hovering over the button to end the call. 

“...I think I might need the company too.” Zhongli whispers.

His finger halts its passage to the screen.

“You— you do?” Childe stutters. 

“...I know,” Zhongli says, slowly, as if he, too, is terrified of Childe withdrawing from him, “it’s been a trying several months. For— for the both of us.”

“She was your wife,” Childe says, head falling back onto his pillow. “I am— was— just some… bystander.” 

“I wouldn’t say that,” Zhongli replies. “If you knew how much she talked about you, you wouldn’t, either.”

Another pause. 

“For what it’s worth,” Zhongli continues, quieter, shyer, this time, “The world was really too quiet, tonight. I’m glad you called me.”

“...You’re welcome, Zhongli,” Childe hums. “Are you… are you going to sleep, now?”

“I cannot, unfortunately,” Zhongli sighs. “My mind is turning with too many possibilities, and my eyes cannot possibly close on their own.”

It almost feels familiar, in the way that he offers, unbidden, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” 

The silence that hangs in the air in the aftermath makes him stutter an apology: “Not that I — I think you’re a kid, or anything, it’s just that I used to—”

“That… would be lovely,” Zhongli replies. “No one has told me a bedtime story in years.”

“I haven’t told a bedtime story in years,” Childe admits. “I’m a little rusty. But… here we go.”

—

A boy and a girl play in the distant woods of Snezhnaya every day. 

The girl’s name is Snegurochka, and she is a fairy with white down for hair and rosy apple cheeks. The daughter of Father Frost, she is treasured, guarded, and loved. 

But she is not free.

“My father will be alarmed if he finds out I’m sneaking out every night again,” the girl admits. “But the stars in the human realm are so beautiful, I can’t help but run out to see them just one more time. We don’t have stars, in the fairy realm.”

“What did your father say before?” The boy asks, watching snowflakes melt starlike patterns into his palms. 

“That the stars will be here even a thousand years later,” she sighs. “That I can wait just a little more. Focus a little harder on my duties.”

“But what do you want?” The boy asks. 

“I want to see them every night. It’s never the same as before — look,” she says breathlessly, grabbing the boy’s hand to point at the stars. “You can’t see it, but every day, the stars move a little bit from their previous positions.”

“If they do, then why does everyone use star-maps?” The boy asks curiously. 

The girl falters, as she stares at her companion. “...Because they don’t move to the human eye. You only really notice if— if you remember how it was a thousand years ago.”

“You’re a fairy, of course you do.” The boy gasps in realisation. “You get to live so long. You get to see the stars change.”

“Yes, the stars change.” The girl whispers. “Every day, when I’m not looking, the stars change bit by bit. It feels like if I just blink, all these stars in front of me will be gone. Shifted. Faded.”

The fairy turns towards the boy.

“You’re lucky, you know, Ajax. The stars will always be the same for you, no matter what,” she murmurs. “While I’m left here, waiting for you to come back to a sky that I can’t stop from changing, between thousands of years.”

“You can’t possibly have waited for that long for me,” Ajax laughs. 

“When you come back,” the fairy murmurs in response, drawing her legs in against her chest, “in your next life, you won’t even notice the sky is different. What do you think about me, waiting for you for so long, that all I can think of is the sky we used to share has faded away, leaving nothing but me behind? What is the solution to this except to keep waiting and watching you fade?”

“Not even you can last forever in one life,” Ajax responds, laughing. “I can only hope that perhaps, one day, you will join me in this brief human life, and experience joy instead of sorrow in change.”

—

Dreams, for the first time in years, come easy to him. 

—

A hearth, steadily warming the little hands hovering near it. 

“Not so near, now,” Mama says, and she’s carrying bowls of ukha for all of them to sip at to warm them up. “You may be freezing but if you go any nearer you’ll be burning.”

“Teucer is freezin’ ‘cause he never wore any gloves,” Anthon giggles. “My hands ‘r warm.”

“Liar! Pants on fire!” Teucer yells, a red flush colouring his cheeks in embarrassment. His hands, however, are redder, from the blood rushing to the surface from the cold. “Mama, feel Anthon’s hands too, they’re also cold!”

“Enough bickering,” Tonia grumbles from the corner, already digging into her ukha. “You’re all so noisy. I’ve heard enough from the both of you scaring away all the fish at the lake.”

The two boys erupt into further bickering: “Well he started it—” “I ain’t started nothing!”

“Boys,” Ajax says, feeling his cheeks strain from the force of his smile, trying not to laugh at the amusing tableau of his siblings in front of him. “Chill. Don’t you want to hear your bedtime story? Naughty kids don’t get bedtime stories.”

“We’re too old for bedtime stories,” Anthon huffs. 

“No way!” Teucer yells. “Ajax’s barely here! If you say that he’s gonna disappear right after bedtime, and that’s so not fair!”

“Don’t worry,” Ajax finds himself lying, “my last assignment’s almost complete. Once that’s done, I’ll have all the time for you guys.”

Mama and Tonia level him a knowing look.

He ignores it.

Just a couple more months. Then it’ll all be over.

One more assignment.

Then— ice fishing on the lake, watching the sunset, for as many sunsets as his little stars would want. 

—

Summer break begins. Despite that, the work never quite ends, for a teacher. The first day of summer break begins with the entire staff waltzing into the staff lounge to hold an impromptu mass-paper-marking-party. Getting through marking the test papers is a droll, but at least they can gossip while they do it. There are no desks in the staff lounge, of course, but they all make do by lying on their stomachs like juveniles, kicking their legs up to mark the papers on the floor. No one, after all, will ever believe anyone who catches them do it. 

For all intents and purposes, their camaraderie as colleagues is strangely stronger than should realistically be possible. But having gone through the thick-and-thin together, they are essentially one giant friend group, if everyone was no younger than thirty-five and had at least one traumatic secret past. They were jaded, but they had, over the years, formed an understanding between each other. An unspoken promise to have each other’s backs. 

“So, you guys up for drinks after this?” Sandrone asks, halfway through frowning at a physics question that involves a picture of a giant magnet that apparently had been answered so atrociously that it had Sandrone’s red pen practically flying across the paper with corrections. Sandrone was a strange one— she wrote specific and long notes for improvement for each student’s paper, because she was so extremely meticulous and particular about her subject that students getting it wrong greatly annoyed her enough to write diatribes forty times over. 

“Well, I’m afraid I have prior engagements,” Pantalone says primly. 

The Doctor grins widely, showing off sharpened teeth — a terrible cosmetic procedure that only further weakened his enamel health, but as the Doctor had said before, “the benefits of scaring the children far outweigh the disadvantages to my nonexistent future self’s health.”

“We are going to fuck,” the Doctor injects. “So we’re busy.”

“Prior engagements,” Pantalone stresses helplessly. 

Sandrone rolls her eyes. “‘Bina?” She asks instead, turning to the woman, who is in the middle of carefully curating the gold-foil star stickers she is pasting to her student’s tests. 

“I love your parties, Sandrone,” Columbina hums sweetly. “But Arle and I were already planning on something intimate for tonight.”

“You’re also gonna fuck?” Sandrone groans.

“No,” Arlecchino levels a stern gaze that flies its burning wings of directed shame directly at Sandrone.

"We'll go," Zhongli offers.

"We?" Sandrone mouths.

"Me and Childe," Zhongli explains, turning his gaze towards Childe. "Won't you come along?"

"Oh Zhongli, anywhere you want me to," Childe grins.

Sandrone gags on the sappiness in the background.

Pulcinella isn't asked, because a sip of alcohol would probably kill the geriatric man.

—

They're six drinks in when Sandrone asks it. Tucked in a corner booth against two walls, in a shadowed part of the dimly-lit, packed bar.

"Huh? Snezhnaya?" Childe repeats faux-dumbly, swirling his drink in a languid motion despite the fact he has a vice grip on the glass. "What of it?"

"That hair screams of Snezhnaya," Sandrone chuckles, nursing a glass herself. "I've always... wanted to ask. It's been so long since you joined us, anyway, so it should be fine, right?"

"What," Childe says, feeling his palms slick with moisture, avoiding Sandrone and Zhongli's curious gaze. "Makes you ask that?"

"I didn't want to be rude," Sandrone murmurs, "but when you first joined, you had a bit of an accent."

Childe grimaces. "...You shouldn't have been able to tell."

She really shouldn't. Fresh off the boat he was already putting his training to use, learning to hide the tells that marked him as other.

"Now you sound like you born here," Sandrone sighs. "It's such a shame, your accent was so pleasing."

"Admittedly," Zhongli sounds idly, "I am also curious. You told me a Snezhnayan fairy tale the other day, did you not?"

It's been a decade and a half, he reminds himself.

Surely... it's alright. They must've given up long ago. Or perhaps they didn't care, anymore.

"I won't tell anyone," Sandrone whispers, "don't worry, we all know we're the Tsaritsa's strays."

"That's not even her real name," Tartaglia chuckles. "It's just a silly nickname I gave her that you all adopted. It's a well-known enough word that I thought you wouldn't... clock my origins."

"You're in a safe space here, Childe," Zhongli smiles.

"Well... you basically already know it," Childe mutters, "I'm originally from Snezhnaya. But all sorts of things happened, over there, and I decided to escape the chaos and come here."

Zhongli, being a history teacher, hums thoughfully. It seems he's already clocked just exactly the thing he was running from.

"The collapse of the Snezhnayan federation," Zhongli offers.

"Yes," Childe admits.

"I remember when it was on the news," Sandrone frowns. "I'd never expected a country so big to just... fall, like that."

"It was a tumultuous time," Childe whispers, "you couldn't really trust anyone. Anyone could be a spy, waiting for you to slip up. And when it all fell apart, it got... even worse."

The first thing you do, when you conquer a nation, Childe remembers, *is remove everyone who supported the one you overthrew.

He was just collateral damage. They were just collateral damage.

"But that was a long time ago," Childe laughs it off. "This... this is my new home now."

"I was from Fontaine," Sandrone offers up, like a peace offering. Perhaps in her own way to say: you've bared your story to me, here is mine. "Before all this, I was an engineer."

Her eyes seem trained on a distant, intangible dream. It might just be the alcohol.

"Then what happened?" He finds himself asking.

"Same as everyone else in the school, I guess," Sandrone laughs. "Flew too close to the sun with my comments. Pissed off a couple guys in power. Like Icarus, I never thought that there was a problem that I couldn't solve with my wits. Turns out, the wrath of the gods dissolves all your plans, huh?"

"Icarus," Childe sounds out. "Enkanomiyan legend, right? Heh. My old man..."

His breath hitches.

He ducks his head to take a sip.

Sighs.

"My old man..." He continues, managing a shaky smile, "always did love those Enkanomiyan legends."

"I had nothing of my parents," Zhongli murmurs, "but in my orphanage, I grew up on the nannies' stories. During the turmoil in Liyue, as you know... I was separated from them. The only thing I remember of them now... are their voices, lilting, telling me tales of gods and spirits bounding through the sky and earth."

"We all had great ambitions, huh?" Childe huffs, ignoring the tight clench in his chest, like a wild, growing, dead knot. "And now we're all... here."

"For what it's worth," Sandrone mutters, "at least my new beginning has you guys."

"To new beginnings," Zhongli smiles, jubilant, despite the wrinkles lined into his cheeks, the weariness in his eyes, he is still utterly radiant.

"To new beginnings," Childe agrees, and the three of them raise their glasses to let them ring as they clink.

—

Childe walks Zhongli home. There's no one to play designated driver for each of them, of course, so they take to the winding, dark streets. Later, Childe will take the lonely trek to his own apartment from Zhongli's, but for now, they fall into an easy pace, their trainers slapping against the potholed pavements. There's a light flush on Zhongli's high cheeks from the alcohol, a smattering of pink paint across an alabaster canvas.

"How's Xiao?" Childe asks suddenly, in lieu of walking in suffocating silence. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jeans, gripping at the fabric lining them. "Is he... adjusting?"

Zhongli blinks, once, twice, and Childe wishes he could kiss those long lashes, but he's promised himself to take it slow. It would look terrible, really, pressing kisses to a newly-widowed man so quickly after the passing of his spouse. He still wants to do it. What does that say about his sense of morality, really?

"As much as you can, after..." Zhongli's voice warbles slightly, an off-key note wavering into the distance. His shoulders are tight, as if he's attempting to compress himself into nothingness.

Childe is a terrible, terrible, man, because he finds himself placing a hand on Zhongli's shoulders, gently smoothing his thumb over the taut musculature of his bicep. It's unusually well-built, for someone who looks so lithe.

Slowly, his shoulders slope downwards into a more relaxed state.

He feels like his hands are burning.

"I understand," Childe offers, "losing family is..."

He swallows back a litany of words that threaten to spill out.

"Painful." He manages. "But you don't have to do it all alone."

Zhongli turns his golden gaze towards Childe, and he feels like he's standing at a tribunal again. Is he worthy? To even dare? Dare to reach out? Is it too presumptuous? Was that kiss before Guizhong a fluke? Perhaps. Maybe. Emotions were running high, then. Perhaps Zhongli didn't really like him as much as he did. Maybe Childe overstepped.

A cold hand cups his cheek. Zhongli's.

His eyes are still mournful, but there is a spirit of a smile in the slight curve of his lips.

"Thank you." Zhongli murmurs, eyes half-lidded. He is unfairly alluring. Childe doesn't know if the hand still lingering on his cheek, slowly warming from the establishment of equilibrium temperature, is reciprocation. It could turn into a slap, perhaps, a long-buried part of him suggests. Anything could be a weapon. A kiss could be suffused with cyanide. Fingernails, like the middling-length almond shaped ones currently resting into the plush exterior of his cheek's skin, could scratch into surface blood vessels a bioweapon. Anything could be possible.

Instead, Zhongli murmurs, in that low timbre that resonates into Childe's cochlea.

"You truly are... more than I deserve." Zhongli whispers against his lips, and —oh, oh, he's leaning in, hovering, waiting for Childe to close the gap, to accede to his request. An air-kiss that could turn into something more. Physical. Perhaps Zhongli isn't going to poison him for his presumption after all. Maybe the kiss they shared before was real. Maybe they could do it again, and he wants to do it so badly, even if both their lips are chapped and dry from the summer heat sapping the moisture from them, even in the dry nights, even if there's a bit of leftover alcohol tainting their breath.

He leans in, and almost, closer, closer—

His instincts kick in.

"Move!" He yells, and yanks Zhongli back as the short blade of a paring knife comes bearing down.

As quickly and subconsciously as breathing, he takes in his surroundings, cataloguing every detail of their attacker. He's stout, with a receding hairline and a crop of tangled hair. He has sweatpants and a white singlet on, yellowed with oil and time. His cheeks are ruddy red, redder than either of them, and there is the potent scent of beer on his breath.

He finds his heart stops pounding in his ears.

It's not them. They aren't being targeted specifically.

He breathes in, staggered, as their attacker stumbles forward, the momentum bringing him down. His movements are sloppy. He's not any sort of trained assassin or agent. Just — an opportunistic, drunk man.

"Gimme your money!" He bellows, waving the knife around.

A paring knife.

Childe could laugh.

"Is that really what you chose?" He mocks. "Kinda stupid choice for stabbing people."

The man, enraged, rushes forward. The knife pointed forward.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

He lets the man lose steam and wrestles his arm into a lock. He struggles to move his wrist. Childe beams and twists his arm so his grip slacks on the handle of the knife, falling to the floor.

It's immediately swiped away by Zhongli, who has had the foresight to take the weapon away before it got anymore involved in the altercation.

"Kindly leave us alone, sir," Zhongli hums with remarkable aplomb, seemingly unbothered by being almost run through with a paring knife.

"I'll — get you!" The man hisses, breaking out of Childe's hold for a moment. Childe curses. Now he's getting sloppy. No matter, he grabs at the man's wrist and — ah, shit, he missed, fuck is he getting sloppy. It's not that he isn't strong, but rather, he's trying not to break the man's wrist, but he can't figure out how strong he should make his hold.

He isn't a killer. He reminds himself. He can't scare Zhongli away. He has to defend, disarm, but never destroy.

"Zhongli, watch out!" Childe exclaims, only to see Zhongli dive down and sweep his leg, breaking the attacker's root and collapsing the man to the ground.

Damn.

The man struggles up, gritting his teeth, like a persistent bastard.

"No you won't," Childe grits his teeth, and knocks the man out with a strategic fist to the head. This time, he doesn't miss.

The man slumps downwards.

"Good work, team." Childe exhales, looking up at Zhongli. "Now where'd you learn a move like that? Breakdancing?"

"If you tell me where you got your reflexes," Zhongli offers coyly, a smirk playing on his lips.

"Cheeky, cheeky, trying to pry out my secrets," Childe chuckles, stuffing his hands back into his jeans. "The people who taught me all I know are long gone. Dead, or worse."

Zhongli lifts his eyes to the smog-obscured moon, pale light barely visible in the murky night sky.

"The last person who knew my secrets has joined the rest in eternal slumber," Zhongli says.

Guizhong. Childe extrapolates. It's a wonder to think the frail, lithe woman he knew was ever involved in a world where even those with the countenance of royalty had to learn to dirty their fists with blood.

The same world, he supposes, where little fourteen year old boys become familiar with the heft of a scattering crimson rubies of blood against the backdrop of white driven snow.

"I can't carry the memory for you," Childe offers quietly, brushing a thumb against the thin skin stretched across the junction between Zhongli's thumb and index finger. "but if you need someone... I'll be right here."

"That... would be most welcome," Zhongli replies, and it feels like the rosebuds have finally shyly peeked out into full-blown flowers.

—

Xiao actually goes to another school. Which to most people, wouldn't make sense. But Zhongli had confided in Childe that he didn't want Xiao living his life with his parents hovering over him.

"After all, I grew up in... relative independence. In a way, my best traits and life lessons came from those around me with differing opinions." Zhongli had said.

Childe goes over to Zhongli's house semi-regularly, now, much to the consternation of the man's son. Xiao always seems irate at the mere idea of Childe stepping over the threshold of the house between acquaintance and family friend. Xiao is also a teenager, so it's difficult to tell if it's because he's always irate or he specifically dislikes Childe in particular. Childe doesn't quite mind— he knows he's intruding into Zhongli's home, into their life. He's still selfish enough to want it. He smoothes his guilt over with casseroles and soups. He's cooking more, now, that he has Zhongli to give food to. The rhythm of making the old recipes that once were second-nature to him, it soothes his mind and frantic hands, and he wonders why he ever stopped. There's still an ache in his chest, when he breathes in the hearty soup's vapors, and scents Snezhnayan pine instead of the lavender scent freshener he's dumped into the corner to make his apartment less musty. Still, it settles like home, instead of a wound.

The point is: one of those days, Childe drives Zhongli home in his beat up Aquabus — it never ceases to feel surreal, like when they'd gone home after Guizhong— nevermind. Zhongli has a whole box of papers to mark and Childe hadn't wanted the man to strain his back carrying it all, so it's strapped to the backseat like their baby, and when the thought flits through his mind he flushes heavily and has to blame it on the heat of the car, whose air-conditioning is merely a suggestion.

Xiao unlocks the gate, doesn't notice Childe there, and begins grumbling about his school assignment to Zhongli.

"—And now it turns out the assignment's about bloody Enkanomiyan mythology instead of Remurian, but I've barely anytime to research for it because it's due tommorow and—"

He pauses when he notices Childe in the doorway.

"Oh. You." Xiao growls.

"Enkanomiyan mythology? I think I can help." Childe grins.

"What would you know?" Xiao grumbles.

"A lot, actually," Childe's expression softens. "My father used to read me a tale every single night, until I was fourteen."

After fourteen, well...

Zhongli brightens. "Oh, why don't you let Childe help you, then? I have some papers to mark, either way, so I'm a bit too busy to help you on that assignment, Xiao."

Xiao's eyes dart from his father to Childe, and he seems to come to a particularly nasty conclusion before sighing, growling, and levelling his gaze to Childe.

"Fine." The boy huffs.

Childe brightens.

Progress. Maybe one day Xiao will accept him.

—

They sit in the dinner table — a small square table, really, fit for three, and Xiao's nose had wrinkled as Childe had sat where Guizhong once had, and Childe had felt supremely guilty, but there was no other seat since Zhongli had taken the other. It was an awkward affair.

But Childe really did know his Enkanomiyan mythology, and soon enough Xiao turned from prickly and sour to ... less prickly and sour, taking down notes dutifully. Minutes turn to hours, and Childe finds that even though its been decades, the tales are fresh in his mind as if his father had just told them the night before.

"—and that's why it's rather difficult to parse the different tales of Persephone," Childe finishes, "because of the very fact that worship of her varied across different time period and regions of Enkanomiya, and they all lent her different epithets depending on how they viewed and personified her."

"I think I have enough information," Xiao says. His notebook is filled completely. "I'll start on my assignment now."

"I'm just glad to have someone to tell this all to, it's been too long..." Childe sighs.

"It really has been too long," Xiao deadpans, eyes glancing to the clock on the wall. He's right — it's night, already, midnight, actually.

"Oh," Childe flushes, "well, I should go—"

"Stay." Zhongli looks up, from where he had been holding vigil. He signs off on the last paper with a red pen and places it back into the box. "It's quite late."

"I— I wouldn't want to impose," Childe breathes, looking at the surprised and miffed Xiao.

"Tommorow's work," Zhongli hums, "you need rest."

"We don't have another room," Xiao defends. "He has a house."

"Now, Xiao, be nice to him. He helped you with your homework," Zhongli reprimands.

"He's right, though," Childe blurts out, "you don't have another room, and I'm too tall for your couch, it's better if I go back —"

"You can stay in my room." Zhongli swings the finishing blow.

"Your room?" Childe swallows nervously, fingers lacing and unlacing together in anxiety. "Do you have an extra mattress?"

"We are dating, aren't we? Why would we need another mattress?" Zhongli asks innocently. Wide eyes and everything.

The resultant screech of the chair legs scraping against the tile and Xiao crashing his hands onto the table in shock bring him out of his fugue.

"WHAT!?"

"Are we... not?" Zhongli tilts his head.

Childe flushes furiously. "I mean — it's barely been — we have't even— the kiss—"

"My apologies," Zhongli says, though its clear the man is reeling too, his shoulders are tight and rigid, and he is no longer as open and inviting as before. "It seems ... it seems that I have misjudged our... situation. My apologies for disturbing you with my overt displays of affection."

Oh. Oh no.

"No, no no no, Zhongli, you've done nothing wrong," Childe shakes his head, "I like you, I really do. But Xiao— and it's too fresh, too new."

"I'm not dealing with this," Xiao seethes, and he storms off to his room.

It just leaves him and Zhongli, now.

"Do you..." Childe lifts his head, "do you like me? Like, like me?" It's so juvenile, like the children they teach. He is still, painfully, woefully, inadequate for anything that requires even a modicum of social awareness.

"I do," Zhongli's voice warbles, like a fragile bird perched atop a thin branch. Almost at risk of falling. Cracking. Breaking forever.

"I like you too," he offers shyly. "And I'm sorry that I didn't realise you saw me that way too."

Zhongli is strong, he had thought. Unbreakable. So strong, the bulwark of his family, holding everything together. He had admired that grit, that ability to maintain composure under every circumstance.

He had forgotten there was a human underneath. Who was hurting. Who was yearning. In Childe's worries about replacing Guizhong, about disturbing an already recovering ecosystem, he had inadvertently left Zhongli with a wound, with no support. Keeping himself at arm's length was only hurting Zhongli. He had assumed that the other man had it under control.

Now, seeing Zhongli, shaking, still unable to cry, he realised that Zhongli needed support, too.

"I — I love you," Childe breathes in realisation. "I'm sorry I took so long to say it."

He surges forward, cupping Zhongli's face in his hands. "Will you let me rectify my mistake?"

"Oh, Childe," Zhongli whispers. "You have always had a place in my heart."

"Will you still let me stay tonight, and be with you?" Childe murmurs.

"I've never wanted anything more," Zhongli replies.

—

"You're not replacing her," Zhongli says, into the cool darkness. They've settled, side-by-side onto the bed.

"It still feels like I'm supplanting her position," Childe sighs. "This bed was hers. Your house was hers. Your love was once hers."

"Guizhong was not a possessive woman," Zhongli comforts, threading a hand through Childe's. "The bed that you lie on, once, she lay here too, and she looked at me in the eyes and asked: You like that Snezhnayan boy, don't you?"

He traces constellations into Childe's palm with his finger, soothing circles that lull him to rest. He's not truly rested in years. Next to Zhongli's warm body, in the sheets, the scent of lilies spritzed onto the comforter, he feels, unwittingly, his muscles unclench, his body releasing some of the tension wound over decades.

"In Liyue," Zhongli says, and to this Childe perks up, because Liyue is a subject rarely spoken. Homelands they'd both run away. Left for a new world. Pain and heartbreak and beauty borne and left there. In Liyue, Zhongli offers, as his fragile flower of a heart, into Childe's unsteady, killer's hands. "we lived a life on the run. Friends came and went. Love was given and lost, in free measure. We learned to share, we learned that love was not to be singularly given. We learned that love came in many forms. We learned to accept, to be grateful, to hold on until we no longer couldn't."

Zhongli turns to Childe, and Liyue is written into his face, the shape of his nose, the gold of his eyes. In Childe Snezhnaya screams aloud, the auburn of his hair, the blue of his eyes.

"Guizhong told us to live," Zhongli says, "and I find that I wish to do that with you."

It is her most precious gift. From beyond. Guizhong was always, eternally, selfless, and ten steps ahead. Wicked smart — to see beyond what two blockheaded men couldn't.

Zhongli offers, in the present, a seed of his soul to Childe. Liyue.

"I don't know how," Childe whispers, terrified, back. Like he's a babe of five years and not a grown, middle-aged man. "Living— I've barely been surviving these past few years."

"Some days... I feel as if I have died long before I stepped foot in this nation." Childe murmurs, pressing his hand to his heart. It beats its own rhythm, quietly, in defiance of the symphonies other hearts he has heard turn to quick and steady quiet.

Zhongli traces a hand over Childe's cheek. "I will tell you what I have not told anyone, what Guizhong took with her."

Zhongli presses his forehead to Childe's, and breathes his story.

—

Zhongli was born an orphan. His father had been killed in the war that shook the world, and his mother gave birth alone in a shelter, where she wasted away until it came time to eject her child. When she did, she died.

Liyue was a nation of constant warring. Warring, back and forth. Zhongli, as a precocious child, learnt from the scarce few books in the orphanage that war was the eternal state of Liyue. Dynasties rose and fell, and that was it.

Shortly after the war, a dynasty fractured. Civil war, they called it. He was still a child. All he knew was that this civil war was tearing apart more than republics.

Zhongli was eleven when his orphanage was struck down for being sympathisers of the previous regime.

What regime? He wondered. How did it even come to be? This mysterious, nebulous, 'previous regime', spoken in hushed whispers.

At a young age, he always wondered how things came to be. It was only natural he gravitated towards history. He wanted to know, always... why he was cursed to be in this horrid place. How was it transformed into hell?

History was his way of control, perhaps. To know is to have power. And knowing, strangely, made him feel better about the terrible situation he was forced into.

—

It went like this: two warring factions declaring jurisdiction over Liyue. Both claimed virtue. Neither was virtuous. In the midst of this infighting hung the future of Liyue. And Liyue was starving.

Freedom fighters, they called themselves. Zhongli was on the cusp of adulthood, the youth washed away from his face long before he could even call himself a teenager. He had tried to make something of himself within the system, tried to follow the ever-shifting rules created in the chaos. Tried to graduate university. Of course, the restrictions grew tighter, tighter.

It was where he met Guizhong.

"It's stupid, isn't it?" She had said, as he stared up at the new notice stuck onto the university gates. It declared that Zhongli's entire major was hereby removed from the university departments. It declared that learning the subject was a sign of sympathising with the opposing faction.

No one had ever said the quiet part out loud. He himself learnt to stay quiet. Yet here this girl was, loud and fierce, despite the fact that if anyone else heard her she would have her neck divorced from her shoulders in a matter of days.

"What?" He asked.

"Come on, you're smarter than you show, I know," she had scoffed.

"It doesn't matter, does it?" He asks, clutching at the newly bought textbooks in his hands, now relegated as useless. For a subject that no longer existed— not in the eyes of the regime. And he'd spent all his money, gathered from his various ventures, the scarce part-time jobs that would even accept destitute orphan boys. It was all... gone. "There's no way for me to show it."

"I know a place where we could use your smarts," she had replied, flicking her eyes to the textbooks in his hands. "Why don't you come with me?"

They called themselves freedom fighters. And they felt like they could change the world.

—

Zhongli's hands were not unfamiliar with busywork, with labour. But time spent gripping the plastic handle of a mop, swirling it in circular motions, did not translate to skill with the rifle they'd shoved into his hands.

He'd have to learn it, nonetheless.

For Liyue to see a better day, he promises himself, and at Guizhong's gentle guidance, he raises his arms, and shoots at the target.

The recoil ricochets the force right through his shoulder, knocking itself through his heart and making the ribcage that once felt impenetrable shake and tremble. He feels his ears ring as the shot fires. It feels like he has just done something he cannot undo.

"Now do that again," Guizhong says, hands steady. She adjusts his grip on the rifle with all the ease of afforded by being their maker. Yes, those delicate hands, in another life, another time, would be that of an embroiderer, or perhaps a guzheng player. In this life, they are smeared with oil, and know the cool body of a rifle's metal chamber better than thread, fibre, or musical string.

—

He is introduced to a host of fellow believers. Freedom fighters, Guizhong had introduced. They called themselves the Adepti, after mythical beings of old. Untouchable, beautiful, and powerful. Bringing blessings upon the world.

"And this is Ping," Guizhong introduces, "my greatest friend."

Ping scoffs and slaps Guizhong on the back. "You — Zhongli, right? — don't listen to this asshole. She calls herself your friend and then steals the spare parts you were hoarding for your projects."

"But Ping, we're friends. And friends share everything, don't they?" Guizhong pouts.

"Yeah, yeah," Ping rolls her eyes. "Whatever." There's fondness still, playing on the edge of her mouth.

Zhongli finds himself trailing after Ping and Guizhong, in awe of their intelligence. He knows nothing but books and words, knows strategies only in theory. He is useless unless he's given an essay to write. They navigate the world easily with their hands, making and crafting everything by their own hands.

He admits later to them that he doesn't understand what use he is to them, given how he has no skills to offer a resistance. All he has is his knowledge of history, honed for a degree he can no longer get.

"Oh, Zhongli, that's why we need you," Guizhong laughs. "Me and Ping have different strengths. You complete our set."

He doesn't understand it, at the time, but he needs a purpose, anyway.

—

"They won't fall for this," Zhongli frowns, looking at their plans for an upcoming raid. "If you note their most recent speeches, they're no longer going to respond in that way. We have to change tactics."

"See, Zhongli?" Guizhong raises her eyebrow. "And you said you weren't worth anything."

"Stop teasing him, Gui," Ping laughs. She turns to him. "Keep it up, A-Li."

A-Li. A nickname. It's so childish, especially for a freedom fighter who wields guns and protests and marches.

He finds himself flushing anyway.

—

It's not all breaking comrades out of county jail and stealing food. In a lull, they hole up in their hideout.

He catches Guizhong and Ping locked in a kiss.

They break apart in surprise, shoving themselves further away to pretend like they weren't snogging just before.

"You..." Guizhong narrows her eyes.

According to the regime, it's wrong. It isn't the natural order. Men and women must procreate in order to create children to fuel the economic machine. There is no use in women shacking up with women.

But Zhongli has read history.

"If you two wish to conceal your... polishing of the mirror," Zhongli says, "perhaps it would do you good to find a less frequented spot."

"Of course A-Li would use such ancient terms to refer to lesbians," Guizhong smirks, amused.

"He can't help it after all," Ping laughs. "Being a history student is baked into his bones."

"Well, since you're so well versed in ancient Liyuen traditions, are there any endearments that ancient people used?" Guizhong asks.

"Well," Zhongli says, "there is one that is commonly called 'companion', but really means 'the only one who knows the music of my heart'."

Guizhong smiles. She whispers it to Ping. They don't realise, really, that it will mean something more painful, later. Right now, the world is difficult, but passion will take them through the brunt of it.

—

"What's something you want to eat or drink, when this stupid war is over and we get normal food again?" Guizhong asks.

"If I had the money..." Zhongli murmurs, "there is this poem that I learnt, that has always made me fascinated with osmanthus wine."

I wish to buy osmanthus flower wine with friends, yet in the end, it cannot be like the carefree days of my youth.

—

They are still, in the end, just children playing an adults game. But they cannot help it. Their comrades are in danger: their hands at risk of getting cut off. For the crime of stealing bread and fish, for the countless hungry and crazed. The ones who bore the brunt of the useless war.

So they pick up their rifles, and march their way to protest in the square.

Surely — surely they wouldn't fire on children, Guizhong reasons. She's wicked smart and everyone in the group trusts her. Zhongli is hesitant, yet still he believes that surely, Guizhong is right. The rifles are only for show. To get them to listen. Surely the state would never fire on children.

They march to the square.

There, they find their rifles completely ineffectual against the metal shell shielding tanks, rolling their way like moving mountains, crushing all beneath. Rifles are useless beneath the rat-tat-tat fire of a machine gun. Blood splurts from chests, heads. Hands lose grip over their rifle. In a matter of minutes, all their comrades are dead.

Guizhong and Zhongli shake as they grip tightly onto each other, pretending to be corpses underneath the mountain of actual dead.

—

They find Ping, who was supposed to hold down the fort in their base, clutching her stomach, soaked with blood.

"No, no, please, Ping," Guizhong had muttered, hands roaming across her lover's face, as if grasping at her would let her hold onto her lover's spirit. To yank it away from its movement into the afterlife.

"We...always knew this could happen," Ping whispers.

They — Guizhong and Zhongli— rip off their sleeves to bandage the wound. It doesn't really help. Ping is dying.

"Gui... remember my promise?" Ping whispered.

"A better world, a better world, for both of us..." Guizhong whispers back, still trying to put pressure on the wound. "Come on, Ping, love, my heart and liver, please, you must survive to see it."

"I do see it," Ping says, eyes glazing, trembling as they try to stay focused on Guizhong. She seems instead to look past her, to some distant land that Guizhong and Zhongli cannot see. "I do see that better world. My next life... I see its beauty."

"No, Ping, no!" Guizhong cries.

"No, listen!" Ping says harshly, for a brief moment she seems cognisant again, instead of staring off at realms unknown. "I am going to a better world. And I promised you the same."

She takes Zhongli's and Guizhong's hands, and presses into them two slips of paper.

Ferry tickets. To far, far away from Liyue. To a new life. A better world.

"No, no!" Guizhong yells.

"Take care of Guizhong for me." Ping whispers to Zhongli. "In my absence."

"No, no, Ping, stay with me," Guizhong, unflappable, intelligent, cunning Guizhong, breaking down for the first time.

"A-Li, Gui... in my workshop," Ping whispers. "...A gift."

"Ping... please, if you go... you are the only one who knows the music of my heart. Please," Guizhong sobs.

"Perhaps... we were cursed from the very beginning, if that was how the tale ended." Ping smiles shakily.

She slumps over, and does not speak anymore. Guizhong wails.

Zhongli finds her workshop — the papers, mechanical diagrams and specifications, all burnt to crisp. She'd likely burnt it before the authorities could come and steal them. Instead, on the table, is a sole bottle of osmanthus wine, keeping a handwritten note from flying into the wind.

—

They board the ferry. There's nothing else to do: everyone is dead.

They clutch the bottle like a lifeline.

—

Zhongli is shaking. Childe clutches at Zhongli's body, holds it close. It seems to soothe the man.

Childe has seen that bottle, in the kitchen. He'd never asked why it was never drunk from. To find that pain was etched into the glass — he knows that he must offer his own story in return.

Childe breathes against Zhongli's lips, and offers back his own pain, beauty, and love: Snezhnaya.

—

He was born Ajax Rybakov, fresh after the war that had shook the world. He was born the third child of six, in a fishing village called Morepesok, which lay on the eastern coast of the Northern continent, one of many municipalities in one of the many, many countries that together became the juggernaut that was the Snezhnayan Federation. In Morepesok, grand dreams were not thought of, and greatness was traded for the mundane. It was not to say no one lived lavishly, but more to say that even those living most lavish lives you could find in the village never aspired for greater heights. Ambition was limited, and that was that.

Of course, there was the military. But everyone knew that the military cared little for fishing village boys, taking them in as disposables and spitting them out mangled and broken. The glamour of the opportunities that military service seemed to afford had long since faded away in the eyes of the villagefolk, after decades of war, and two of the greatest the world had ever seen that seemed almost back to back.

It wasn't good news when the military came to your doorstep, no, not at all. It meant they were gearing up for another pointless war.

This time, however, Ajax was fourteen. He was rowdy — rowdier than was typical even for a village boy with little to do for entertainment but go fishing and help around the house.

This time, the men with the thick army-issue boots and their macabre black coats and rifles slung along their back were not looked on with horror, but relief.

This time, they were not here for all men above eighteen.

This time, they were here for just one. Boy, not man.

They were here for Ajax Rybakov, fourteen years old, born at the end of summer (if that even meant anything this part up north), who was kneeling in a snowdrift that was suffused with blood, which turned pristine white red as it bloomed bloody petals into the pile of snow. Around him were several men, twice his size, with beards cultivated for longer than he'd been alive, lying scattered in a circle around him, like fish waiting to be frozen after a good catch. His cheeks were ruddy red, giving him a youthful countenance that was throughly at odds with the blood streaked across his nose. In his hands, was, of course, nothing. No weapon.

The boy had, of course, beaten the men with his bare hands.

"I suppose you're sending me off to the crackhouse?" The boy whispers, a manic smile stretching its way across his mouth, revealing three chipped teeth and blood slowly pooling on his tongue, dripping its bloody trail down his chin. "Who called you? Anatoly? That coward bastard? Or was it perhaps Mikhael? Did he finally find his courage after I clocked him on the head?"

"No, boy," a low, mournful voice cuts through the rising murmurs from the crowd of bystanders. "It was me."

It is the boy's father.

"No," the boy pales.

There is very little a parent cannot forgive of their child. A small, and slim margin of behaviours that cannot be overlooked. So difficult to even cross into.

As blood drips down his knuckles, Ajax learns that he has somehow managed to achieve the hollow victory of such luck.

It is not his fault, of course — he was made that way.

Ajax Rybakov is formally taken into custody of the state five days later. It is said that his parents signed off on the form relinquishing their hold over him right on the spot, as the soldiers dragged his screaming, kicking self away from the snowdrift and right onto a tarp covered truck. They knock the side of his head with the butt of a rifle. He falls unconscious in the back of that truck.

He will come back, later. But he will never be the same.

They will not look at him the same, either.

But he will survive.

It is not the first time, of course, he has been carried off in a truck to nowhere.

—

A boy does not simply learn to slaughter. Killing is in the animal instinct and biological impulse that is oft restrained by the even more animal instinct to socialise and burrow oneself into the safest position, protected by community. Killing is fighting is survival. But slaughter is another matter entirely. Slaughter is not animal — it is the most human thing of all. The sheer logistics of systematically slaughtering an entire group of people is not something an instinct-driven creature can achieve. They lash out blindly, but they are never determined. They do not wake up from slumber to continue to the act.

Ajax Rybakov slaughters the entire squad of soldiers that had dragged him to the frigid wastes of their camp in cold blood, the moment he comes to. He, of course, had gotten his hands on a rifle. His aim is frighteningly accurate for a mere lanky teenager with no prior record of having even seen a firearm. He braces the recoil of the shot with much less response than someone untrained usually would. It barely fazes him. His eyes are ghastly and almost blank.

He is only stopped when a supporting squad comes to support, shooting him three times in the thigh, and twice in through the stomach.

He survives, still.

A higher-up notices this exceptional event. They move to order execution of the boy.

Someone far higher up than said higher-up blocks the motion.

The boy, after all, will be an exceptional asset.

Ajax Rybakov wakes to his hands and legs bound with military-grade steel rope, his mouth duct-taped to prevent any thoughts of biting his way to freedom, and sat in a surprisingly plush armchair, across a man lounging, enveloped, by furs more expensive than his whole village's yearly revenue.

It is not, evidently, the military camp he once was.

"Abyss, isn't it?" The man sneers, after drawing a long, sighing sip from his glass of indeterminate liquid. Later the boy will learn it is wine. Not too common for a fishing village boy to readily recognise. Even later the boy will learn it is from a premium vineyard in Poisson, Fontaine, aged for thirty years — a rarity of the highest degree, to be exported from warm, temperate Fontaine across the ice floes and blizzards into Snezhnaya.

The boy does not know this now. He does not particularly care. Because the man has mentioned what no one has known about. What no one has believed. He makes a noise of desperate surprise. He lurches forward to grasp at the man — forgetting his hands are bound and his mouth is muffled.

"Ah, you have stumbled on an unfortunate tumour in our nation," the man continues. "And somehow... you've come out alive."

"You will take my offer, boy," the man sneers, "there's not much left for you, given you've slaughtered property of the state."

The boy scoffs.

"Oh, don't worry, there'll be plenty of area for bloodshed," the man assures, a steely glint in the eye. "The only thing is, well..."

"First, you'll have to die."

Legally, of course.

—

They drug him half the time, then, when the time is right, they let loose the leash. He's lethargic and weary and barely-alive until the cocktail wears off, right as they shove guns and pistols and knives into his hands and pockets, and he's standing in front of a warehouse. By then, he's too enthralled by the idea of being able to fight a strong opponent that surely guards this highly-secure stronghold that he barely fights against the fact he's been drugged to hell and back for weeks on end.

The ominous atmosphere signals that this is, indeed, one of the Abyss' hideouts.

Abyss: lynchpin of the world's criminal underground. Puppeteering politicians, ferrying opium in the heyday when it was popular, now pushing its more glamorous and potent cousin, fentanyl. They touted guns even where guns weren't in good standing, and they had their hands in every pot when it came to criminal ventures. They were crippled, however, after the war. Countries desperate to look good after five years of suffering and conflict. The Abyss suffered losses as they were pushed out. Politicians they once puppeteered cutting ties suddenly. Support pulled.

Worse: their warehouses raided, their members arrested by the police that had once turned a blind eye to their operations.

They, the Abyss, had vowed never to succumb to the power of the law ever again.

The way to do this, of course, was to kidnap impressionable young children and turn them into killing machines. Of them, only Ajax ever escaped.

He was, of course, the only one who ever saw success in said training. The rest died. The operation was deemed useless. He was sent for execution — unable to be controlled, turned violent by their own hands and training.

He was not one to be killed so early and so embarrassingly, not after what they'd turned him into. It was the first time he'd turned his own execution into that of his enemies'.

He had made his way back to his village all on his own, yet the relief his family felt upon his return quickly faded like the ephemeral summer turned quickly to autumn.

He was broken.

Because of the Abyss.

I'll play along with the army for now, then, the boy decides, teeth bared. After all, they've allowed me to continue my revenge.

He strolls into the warehouse, cocks his gun, and begins firing.

—

His success in the field makes him much more valuable than to be relegated to a life in the military.

"The lot of them are cannon fodder," the man— his handler, now— says, smiling. His thick and bushy mustache, jet-black, folds up along with his lips. "You, boy, are much more special than that."

I'm no one's attack dog, the boy wants to say. I'll kill you if you even consider using me.

But he knows there's more ways to die than ways to kill the people trying to kill you. He is a one-man army, but the state, has an actual, hundred-thousand strong army at their disposal. More than that, they have ways to kill him that don't require going an inch near his killing hands. They could gas him in his sleep: they already did to make him fall asleep in the first place. All they had to do was up the chloroform concentration levels, really. He'd die if the dose was any higher. They could shoot him with a sniper. He was fast, but not fast enough to dispatch a sniper. Especially if there were multiple. There was a multitude of ways to kill him, and all the state had to do was play the numbers game.

And more than anything, he wanted to survive.

"It's not like I have a choice, right?" The boy chuckles sardonically.

"No, you don't. Quite astute of you. We'll make an agent out of you yet."

It is after that that Ajax Rybakov dies in the eyes of the law. The state agency succinctly named the Committee for State Security, known internally as the Fatui, gains a new agent in the name of Tartaglia. This time, he is more than killing machine. Another round of brutal training, but instead of knives and guns in his hands, it is lockpicks and poker cards to train into him the art of sleight of hand. It is learning to perform wardrobe changes in a blink of an eye, shoving eye-catching auburn under boring brunette wigs, shifting disguises from harried schoolboy to consummate professional, businessman with a briefcase to lowly custodian.

He is made a spy.

—

Of course, he is still but a lowly cog in the machine. And many more forces are vying for a piece of the power that is fated to fracture. The Snezhnayan Federation is not the iron monolith that it presents itself as. It is a dozen and even more territories with antithetical cultures and beliefs held together tenuously by tape and propaganda. It was always destined to fall. How, on the other hand, was not yet to be determined.

It started with an offer. The other world power that kept Snezhnaya in check. The United States of Khaenri'ah. Startingly similar to Snezhnaya: fifty or so territories in a trench coat masquerading as a single country. They had been locked in a silent battle of wits and threats for a decade or so — and they were tired of it. They were ready to shake the status quo. Snezhnaya was already crumbling from the inside: they were ready to deal the finishing blow.

So it started with an offer.

"What." Tartaglia murmurs, "makes you think I will take the deal?"

What makes you think I will betray this country?

He wasn't patriotic. Not in the slightest. Growing up in Morepesok meant the 'state' was a phantom that haunted them, but they held no loyalty to it.

Still, they had made him into who he was. And they were fiercely protective of their assets. Finding a way to answer the offer was exceedingly difficult: it meant slipping out of their hold for a moment long enough to speak to the Khaenri'ahn representative that had snuck into the country.

"And furthermore... you know I don't work with the Abyss." Tartaglia sneers.

"The Abyss is a rot on our nation," the Khaenri'ahn in front of him whispers. "But we manage it. As for you... well, it is in your best interest to work with us, considering your protection is tied to a country that, as you very well know, will fall. Sooner... or later."

Of course he knew. He was a spy. He was trained to be cunning. He was trained to be observant.

His superiors were getting increasingly desperate. Sending him off on riskier missions into much more hostile countries. Looking for something. Leverage. To delay their impending doom.

He had no interest in being a part of said doom. He knew Khaenri'ah had the world on their side. If he stayed any longer on Snezhnaya's he'd find himself in front of an international tribunal, sooner or later. Snezhnaya would allow his execution to save face.

He, most of all, had always wanted to survive.

"I have one extra stipulation," He finds himself saying. "If I work with you... I want your assistance in extracting my family."

—

His family was his one weakness.

In fact, the very reason he was allowed to go back and visit them was because it strengthened that weakness. Gave him a liability that was easily threatened. If he ever stepped out of line, he could be controlled by a simple dagger to his brother's throat. Despite his best efforts, he was no wild dog. He still had sentiment.

Still, he would be loathe to refuse the offer. No matter what, he had to see his family again.

"You have a lot of nerve coming back," his father growls, as he finds his wayward son, grown, matured, on the doorstep.

"They've tempered me," the boy replies, "and I'm only here to see Teucer and the kids. I won't bother you and Mama."

"You know about Teucer?" His father's eyes widen in fear.

"Papa, I'm in the Fatui," the boy smiles. It's not a threat. It's still perceived as one. "Of course I know everything."

They don't bar him from entering the door after that.

Still, he's glad they allow him to keep up a farce to his siblings. He is a Fatuus, and he falls back on his training to summon soft big brother Ajax. Just for his siblings. He smoothes out his cracks and sharp edges, sits down, and greets his youngest sibling.

"Hey, Teucer. It's your big brother Ajax," he smiles, and for a moment, it doesn't feel like a lie.

He visits, when he's free. It's warm, warmer than the Fatui could give. For a moment, he forgets the concealed gun against his thigh, the three sharp knives he keeps in his boot. The cyanide hidden in the crystal of his red earring.

It doesn't last. Of course it wont.

After his talk with the Khaenri'ahn agent, he stumbles his way back home. He goes ice fishing with his siblings. He breathes in fear and hope as he cups their soft, innocent cheeks in his cold hands, and hopes, hopes, that they survive.

“Don’t worry,” Ajax finds himself lying, “my last assignment’s almost complete. Once that’s done, I’ll have all the time for you guys.”

Mama and Tonia level him a knowing look.

He ignores it.

Just a couple more months. Then it’ll all be over.

One more assignment.

Then— ice fishing on the lake, watching the sunset, for as many sunsets as his little stars would want. 

One more assignment:

Just wait for the Federation to fall.

—

It all goes wrong.

Of course.

When has he ever gotten anything he wanted, in life?

"I'm really disappointed in you, Tartaglia," his handler whispers, a gun cocked right against his head. He knows it's empty — it can only shoot six bullets, and there are six bodies slumped against the floor of his childhood home. Still, even if he escapes, there are seven snipers stationed outside his home. He is dead either way.

"I'm disappointed in myself, too," Tartaglia laughs, and laughs, and then he knees the man right in the solar plexus, and teaches him that the dog never quite got defanged. He was only bribed: and the bone, wrenched from his teeth, was the only thing stopping his fangs from burying themselves deep in the flesh of his 'owners.'

He takes the knife from his boot and shoves it deep into the man's stomach. Then, he takes the man's cloak, his long, furry, hat, and his snow visor. He shuffles his way out of the house in the man's gait.

You shouldn't have made me a spy, he cackles internally. He pretends not to notice his boots are stained with blood. For the first time he has to stop breathing: the copper isn't motivating, but nauseating, now. Funny how he only gains a conscience when it comes to his family.

He waves the snipers off, gets into his former, dead, handler's car, and before they realise it, drives off.

They don't have power over him anymore, anyway.

The Federation has already fallen. Crippled by Khaenri'ah.

—

"We're sorry," the representative says, after he demands, with red-rimmed eyes and shaking hands, for an exit.

"No," he chuckles, "you're not. But you owe me. And if you don't want what I did to the Federation to happen to you, well..."

"We'll get you your papers," the representative says, unfazed.

The Federation has fallen: its fractured remains still chase after the traitors. He is one of them.

They cannot chase down a traitor who is already dead.

—

Thirty days after his family's death, Tartaglia dies.

Childe, with his freshly minted passport carrying the same false name, red scarf wrapped around his neck, disembarks a Celestia Air civilian aeroplane at the Khaenri'ah International Airport. He is not unusual in the throes of people that rush out. He is merely a Khaenri'ahn-born Snezhnayan who moved back to his land of birth after that of his ancestors' collapsed a sad, pitiful death.

He thinks back to the last conversation he had with the representative.

*"There is no room in the budget to allocate to your funds."

Fat lot of good spying for those ungrateful bastards did. As it turns out, paying a pension for every single goddamn double-agent was a bit too expensive for the cheapo bastards. After sacrificing his whole life for the stupid chance to get his family out of the situation he'd put them in, all he got was dead family and no money to show for it.

"You'll have to lay low, we're entering a new era, where we focus on honesty to the public, instead of constant fear of spies." Lies, lies, excuses. Still, beggars cannot be choosers, and Snezhnaya is a minefield instead of a home, now.

So he doesn't get anything for his troubles, except a posting to a rundown school with even more suspicious characters, all rejects of the grand plan that Khaenri'ah had promised them they were part of.

He might as well make the most of it.

There's nothing left to live for, after all.

Still, he cannot bring himself to die.

He, selfishly, wants to survive.

He spends hours training the accent out of his voice.

Might as well cover his bases. Khaenri'ah had spies in Snezhnaya — but Snezhnaya did, as well.

—

"In a way... we're both running from things, it seems." Childe chuckles. "Just that... while you were noble, all I did was further bloodshed. I'm a monster, Zhongli."

"No," Zhongli raises his golden eyes up to meet Childe. "No, I may not have killed as much as you have, but I cannot call myself noble and call you a monster."

"But..." Childe sighs, "I— I love you, but I don't think that I'll bring you any luck."

The people he loved were doomed the moment he entered their life once more.

"They have not managed to find you in years," Zhongli whispers, "but if it makes you feel safer, I still know my way around a gun."

"Zhongli," Childe chuckles, "I was a government spy. Before that, I was a child assassin. I don't think I've forgotten how to fire a gun either."

"Then what is there to fear?" Zhongli murmurs.

"I..." Childe falters — Zhongli is looking at him with such a pleading gaze. It makes him weak.

"Ajax, please," Zhongli continues — it is the finishing blow.

"Oh, fine, you stubborn bastard," he snaps fondly, and surges forward to kiss Zhongli on the lips.

It's warm as ever. It feels like home. It feels clichéd. It feels like fairytales that he once thought could apply to him.

It's Zhongli, in all his beautiful, stubborn, stupid, glory.

—

Zhongli was perfect. And the space Childe used to inhabit, where Guizhong once sat, was once filled with perfection, as well. And Childe knew there would come the day when Zhongli would realise that Childe wasn’t good enough for his perfection.

But Zhongli still seemed to want him, despite the imperfection. Zhongli still invited him to share his bed, day after day, despite knowing there was blood on his hands.

"Ajax," Zhongli would whisper into his ear, every morning, a hand on his, red lips brushing against the soft flesh of his earlobe. Once, an earring with a red glass capsule holding cyanide hung off it. Now, it is Zhongli's apple-red lips that pinch at it.

"I love you," Zhongli whispers.

He believes it more and more, every day. The man fends off his prickly son, who Childe tries not to offend. He insists on holding hands even as they walk into the school. They got proud snickers from their colleagues for that. Congrats, Sandrone had said, for finally getting together, you difficult fuckers. Arlecchino had given her blessing to Zhongli to dropkick Childe if he tried anything funny. Their ice queen of a principal had smirked when she saw them, a first for her. She never showed anything other than a calm and neutral expression. This time, she beckoned her long fingers, to which the Doctor groaned and coughed up a fifty from his purse. Apparantly— it was a longstanding bet. Initiated by Guizhong, of course, may she rest in peace.

"I love you too," Childe says, honestly.

It still feels strange. To wake up and know love was waiting. He had lived life chasing it, taking it in small, hurried bites. A scavenger feasting on scraps. Little moments with his siblings that were taken away just as quickly by the Fatui and his parents. To have just... a mountain of it, a feast, waiting for him — it was greatly overwhelming. To have so much freely given, without having to kill or fight to get it.

"Xiao's going off, today," Zhongli murmurs quietly.

"It's okay to miss him, but we can always video call," Childe huffs back. "He's grown up so much, hasn't he? I still remember when he was tiny and prickly."

"You describe him like a cactus," Zhongli chuckles.

"He is a cactus," Childe laughs, "but I love the little scamp anyway. Keeps me on my toes."

"Don't lie," Zhongli ribs, "you're excited he's moving out so you can have me all to yourself?"

"Not all to myself, he's still visiting every other weekend," Childe reminds.

"Twelve days of me all to yourself is a little bit much still, don't you think?" Zhongli laughs.

"Only because you give it to me," Childe nuzzles Zhongli. "Only because you allow it."

"I'll always allow it, Ajax," Zhongli murmurs back, and everything is beautiful and bright. He feels lighter than a feather, knowing this man is his for forever.

—

Xiao acts as if he isn't fond of Childe. Childe helps him pack his luggage, anyway.

“You won’t replace her,” Xiao says, quietly. The boy— no, man, now, moving out. He's entering nervously into independence, still seeking a little Zhongli's comfort, but looking to new horizons. He's got all the confidence of a newborn lamb, for all that he tries to hide it behind a cool facade. At his age, Zhongli and Childe were familiar with the feeling of a rifle in hand, of the hot steam of exploded rubble. Xiao is more familiar with the click-click of a keyboard, hands flying faster than Childe can ever manage over it. Xiao's fit for this world. Despite everything, Guizhong and Zhongli managed to insulate Xiao from the pain of their past. A better world, he thinks. Beautiful — where children have time to grow. Where even lanky and older, they can still seek their parents for assistance.

“I’m not aiming to,” Childe shrugs, folding up Xiao’s hoodies into the luggage. He folds, definitely, far messier than Guizhong— Guizhong had an artist’s hands, and she deftly manoeuvred any craft project she was on. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you call me ‘Mum’ anytime soon. I know how important she is to you.”

“Do you?” Xiao raises an eyebrow. There's curiosity hidden beneath the acerbic stare.

“Believe me, more than you think,” Childe says. “It’s nothing like yours, but for a period of time I didn’t have any family at all, either. I had to find my own, amongst people I never thought I'd consider family.”

It's not just Zhongli — it's Sandrone, Arlecchino, the Doctor, Pantalone, even old man Pulcinella, and the woman who took a nobody with no credentials in, their ice queen principal. They've all managed to huddle together, somehow, carving a community out of outcasts.

“It’s okay to think of her, you know?” Childe murmurs to Xiao. “But you have to live life, too. Imagine if you were the one to go first… wouldn’t you want your Baba to live happily, too?”

Xiao seems to come to a realisation. Childe lets him think on it, instead, laughing, and shutting the clasp of the luggage for him.

“You’ll come back to visit, right? No need to agonise over it.Your Baba and I will always be waiting, here.”

—

Childe piles them all into his well-used Aquabus car, peeling blue paint and a convertible hood. Xiao’s scarce things are packed into the boot. Childe has turned the creaky, staticky radio on, and it blasts out a rock song, with lots of electric guitar, and screaming.

Meanwhile, Zhongli sits next to Xiao in the backseat. Childe can hear a little of their conversation, over the radio. He pretends not to — this is between them. He just has a spy's training: he can't help but hear everything. He tries not to, still. He sings along with the song, trying to drown it out, but again, he has been conditioned to hear even the quietest conversation. And a part of him still keeps his peripheral vision alert, seeing in the rearview mirror Zhongli and Xiao.

“Xiao,” Zhongli murmurs, “How you’ve grown.”

“I’m still the same as ever, Baba,” Xiao says.

“No,” Zhongli says, and a gentle smile emerges. “You’re growing. You’re changing. So different from your childhood. Continue growing, okay?”

Into Xiao's hands is pressed, a bottle of wine. There’s still a little left, sliding lazily in the bottle. Osmanthus wine. Ping's gift to Zhongli and Guizhong... well wishes of a better life passed down to the kid.

“A gift,” Zhongli says, an air of amusement, “now that you can drink.”

“Baba… don’t you…” Xiao trails off.

Zhongli turns, a little, towards Childe.

“Not anymore,” Zhongli said. “If you grow, don’t I have to grow along with you? I’ve got to catch up, don’t I?”

Childe smiles.

—

When Childe and Zhongli return home, they find, on the bedside table, an old note, folded into a paper crane.

"Ah," Zhongli cups his mouth.

"Guizhong?" Childe asks, thumbing over the crane; a rhetorical question, he could never forget her signature. It's folded inside out, so the words are displayed along the wings instead of hidden beneath. A note.

"Ping," Zhongli murmurs, "she passed it on to us. Guizhong gave it to Xiao, before she..."

"And he's given it to us?" Childe raises his eyebrow.

Zhongli laughs — it tinkles, like the first snow of winter.

"It seems he's approving of you, after all," Zhongli smiles.

It slides into place so quietly. The realisation.

Ajax laughs along with Zhongli, in his hands the tender well-wishes of love, passed down, shared, given freely.

He doesn't feel like he deserves his place — nonetheless, they carve it out for him, and urge him to sit.

And who is he to refute the wishes of those who love the man he now sleeps next to?