Chapter Text
Mondstadt smelled like fresh bread and wet cobblestone that morning, and Lohen decided that was reason enough to be in a good mood.
Somewhere down near the Good Hunter, someone was arguing cheerfully with Marjorie over the price of apples, and a cluster of pigeons scattered off the cathedral steps as a courier ran past with an armful of parcels. The wind carried the faint sound of Venti's lyre from somewhere near the plaza, half a melody that never quite resolved into a whole song, which was fitting, since the bard himself rarely finished anything he started either.
He'd been back from Nod-Krai for a few weeks now. The ache in his shoulder from the expedition had mostly faded, only showing up when he stretched too hard. The city had stopped treating him like a returning hero and gone back to treating him like a nuisance, and he preferred it that way. Heroes didn't get to climb the Cathedral scaffolding on a dare. Nuisances did.
Peace didn't suit him, if he was honest. Three weeks without a real fight and he'd already rigged a tripwire outside the barracks kitchen and lost a small fortune betting on which knight would set it off first. Varka still hadn't forgiven him for the flour.
"You're doing it again," Kaeya said, not looking up from the report he was pretending to read at the outdoor table outside the Knights' headquarters. "That face means you're about to do something Jean is going to yell at you for."
"I don't have a face," Lohen said, all wounded innocence.
"You have several faces. This is the mischief one. I've catalogued them."
"You've catalogued my faces?" He sounded almost impressed.
"Somebody has to." Kaeya finally looked up, one eye narrowing in the particular way that meant he was enjoying himself. "So which is it. Climbing something, or telling Jean a half-truth she's going to catch you in by sundown."
Lohen dropped into the chair across from him and propped his boots up on the table's edge, earning an immediate swat from a passing knight he didn't bother identifying. "None of the above. I'm just happy. Is that so hard to believe?"
"From you? A little hard to believe, yeah," Kaeya said, without a trace of sympathy.
"That's rude, coming from you," Lohen said, hand pressed to his chest like he'd been wounded.
"It's accurate, coming from me," Kaeya shot back, entirely unbothered.
Varka chose that exact moment to stride past the table, still dusted faintly white along one shoulder from an incident three days prior that Lohen had sworn up and down was an accident. The captain paused just long enough to level a look at him.
"You," Varka said, pointing a finger at him, "owe me a new coat."
"I owe you nothing. The flour was biodegradable. Practically a gift."
"It was in my boots for two days."
"Character building." Lohen grinned up at him, entirely unrepentant. "You're welcome."
Varka made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan, the sound of a man who had given up trying to win these exchanges years ago, and kept walking toward the training grounds, muttering something about expedition applications and unconventional knights that Lohen chose not to examine too closely.
Mika found them like that, Lohen with his boots up, Kaeya looking entirely too pleased with himself, and made the small, resigned sound he made when he'd decided not to ask. "There's, um, a courier bag for the western farms... Before noon, if you can. Jean wants it out before the weather turns."
"Weather's fine," Lohen said, glancing at the sky, which was, admittedly, doing something faintly ominous along the western ridge.
"I checked the wind patterns this morning, and it's really not." Mika fidgeted with the strap of the courier bag. "I don't want to be the one who tells Jean you got caught in it."
"Relax, Mika!" Lohen exclaimed, already slinging the bag over his shoulder. "I've survived worse than rain."
"That's not exactly reassuring..." Mika muttered, but he held the bag out anyway with both hands.
He took it, weighing it in his hand, light, just letters and a small parcel, nothing that needed an escort, and slung it over his shoulder. "See, this is why I like simple errands. No monsters, no bandits, no getting yelled at by Jean for coming back with my uniform torn in places uniforms shouldn't tear."
"That only happened the one time," Kaeya said, already grinning.
"It happened four times, and you know it did."
"Fine, four times," Kaeya allowed, "but it's still statistically insignificant."
Kaeya laughed at that, the real kind, not the performance he did for strangers, and something in Lohen's chest settled the way it did whenever the people he cared about were relaxed enough to laugh at nothing in particular. He liked mornings like this. He liked them more than he liked admitting he liked them.
Before he left, he found Klee sitting on the headquarters steps with a small pile of rocks arranged by color, muttering to herself about which ones would make the best bomb decorations. He crouched down next to her, careful not to disturb the rock hierarchy.
"These the ones that go boom, or the ones that just look like they go boom?" he asked, crouching to inspect the pile.
"Look like," Klee said seriously. "I'm saving the boom ones for later."
"Wise," Lohen said, nodding along. "That's very tactical of you."
"Do you want one?" She held up a smooth gray stone, offering it proudly.
"I'd be honored." He took it and tucked it into his pocket, where it would stay for longer than either of them could have guessed. "Are you leaving?" She looked up at him, suddenly suspicious.
"Errand. I'll be back before dinner." He flicked her nose, light, and stood before she could retaliate with whatever was in her other pocket. "Don't blow up the steps while I'm gone."
"No promises!" she called after him, already grinning.
He was still smiling about that when he passed Jean's office. He stuck his head in just long enough to say he was heading out.
Jean looked up from a stack of reports that seemed to multiply the longer she sat with them. "Heading out where?"
"Courier run. Western farms. Back before dinner." He watched her expression shift from pleased he'd told her to suspicious about why he sounded so cheerful over a mail run.
"You're taking a mail run seriously enough to tell me about it in person."
"I'm a considerate vice captain! This is just who I am now."
"Uh huh." She didn't quite smile, but something in her face loosened. "Take the west road, not the shortcut through the woods. There've been reports of wolves."
"Wolves don't scare me, Jean."
"I know. That's precisely the problem." She went back to her reports, already halfway back into whatever numbers she'd been drowning in before he interrupted. "Be careful."
She didn't stop him. She never really could, not with words alone, and they both knew it. She just told him to be careful, the way she told everyone to be careful.
He didn't think much of it. He never thought much of it. Careful was a word other people used for other people.
The road west out of the city was quiet in the particular way mid-morning roads were quiet. A few farmers, a courier or two, the distant clatter of a windmill turning. Lohen walked it with the courier bag against his hip and his spear across his back out of habit rather than expectation, whistling something tuneless that Venti had probably taught him without either of them noticing. The grass on either side of the road had gone gold with the season, and somewhere off to the north a hawk circled low over the fields, hunting something Lohen couldn't see from here.
He passed the old windmill first, its blades turning slow and lazy in the mid-morning breeze, and gave a wave to the farmhand repairing a section of fence nearby. A little further on, the road dipped down through a shallow valley where the wind always seemed to pick up, tugging at his cloak and carrying the smell of tilled earth and distant rain. He liked this stretch of the walk. It was the kind of ordinary that made the rest of his life feel earned, all the fighting and the danger balanced out by mornings like this one, where the worst thing waiting for him was a few farmhands complaining about the weather.
He almost missed the man standing at the treeline, though Lohen didn't usually miss much out here. He'd trained a particular kind of attention into himself over years of picking fights he probably shouldn't have picked, and it caught on the man immediately. The man was too still. People waiting for someone stood a certain way, shifting their weight or checking the road or fidgeting with their hands, but this man simply stood and watched, wearing a coat too formal and too clean for someone loitering at the edge of a farm road.
Lohen slowed his walk without breaking stride. He studied the man the way he'd study an unfamiliar Hilichurl camp. A pale coat. An odd symbol at the collar, something official and foreign that made the hair on his arms stand up. Fatui, he was fairly sure. He'd heard rumors about their agents moving through Mondstadt's outskirts before, but nothing solid enough for the Knights to act on. He'd never actually seen one standing so plainly in the open, watching a road like he was waiting for exactly the person walking down it. Something about that felt like an opening. Lohen felt the particular warmth that always preceded him doing something Jean would call reckless and he would call proactive.
He didn't approach. He wasn't stupid, whatever Kaeya liked to imply. He kept walking, kept his pace steady, and let his eyes drift past the man without lingering. Every other sense he had stayed locked onto that treeline.
The farms were another twenty minutes out. He handed the courier bag over to old Herrick, who ran the westernmost plot and complained about his knees every single time Lohen came by.
"You're late," Herrick said, though he was already digging through the bag for his letter.
"By ten minutes. I'll live with the shame."
"Ten minutes is ten minutes. My nephew in Liyue would've had it here yesterday."
"Your nephew in Liyue doesn't have a Grand Master threatening to reassign him to gate duty if he's late filing reports."
"Fair point." Herrick finally cracked a smile, the kind that came slow on a face used to squinting at crops all day, and handed over a small parcel wrapped in cloth for the return trip. "How's the crop?"
"Better since the frost let up. You want tea before you head back? Wife's got a pot on."
"Can't. Got a patrol to arrange before nightfall, probably." He accepted a cup anyway, because refusing Herrick's wife's tea was a battle nobody won, and drank it too fast to properly enjoy it while Herrick talked about crop rotation and a fence that needed mending and whether the Knights could spare anyone to help with it.
Lohen said yes to the fence without really thinking about it and turned back toward the city with his mind already three steps ahead, working out how fast he could get a patrol back out here before nightfall.
He never made it back to tell anyone. The ambush came from both sides of the road, too precise for Hilichurls and too coordinated for bandits. Lohen had his spear off his back before the first blade cleared its sheath. It was pure instinct, the same one that had kept him alive through worse odds than this. For one sharp, bright moment, he thought he had it.
He fought the way he always fought: fast, close, and without a shred of restraint. The first agent came at him with a short blade, and Lohen sidestepped it easily, driving the butt of his spear into the man's ribs hard enough to hear something crack. A second one came from the left, and he caught the strike on the shaft of his spear before the momentum threw them both off balance, using the opening to put one agent down hard enough that they didn't get back up. A third opened a line across his forearm before he could turn, and he answered it by sending them stumbling back with a curse in a language he didn't recognize, blood already welling up along his own sleeve where the blade had caught him.
Four more emerged from the treeline before he'd finished with the first three, moving with the same too-clean precision as the man who'd been watching him earlier. Lohen threw the smoke pellet he always kept tucked in his sleeve for exactly this kind of math, and for a few seconds the world went white and choking and useless to everyone but him. He used it, cutting through the haze toward the gap he'd spotted between two of the newer arrivals. For a handful of seconds it felt like every other fight he'd ever won, messy and loud but entirely under his control.
More agents kept coming. Four became six. Six became eight. Lohen realized this wasn't a fight he was meant to win. It was a fight he was meant to lose slowly, long enough for something else to happen.
He nearly got free anyway. He put his shoulder into a gap between two agents and felt the wind of open road for one blinding heartbeat. Then the world folded sideways as something struck the back of his skull and the ground came up to meet him.
The last thing he registered was the pale coat from the treeline, crouching down in front of him, slow and almost gentle. His cheek was pressed into cold dirt and his vision was already sliding into static.
"He's a fighter," the man said to someone Lohen couldn't see. "Good. The doctor likes fighters." Then there was nothing.
Time passed strangely after that, in fragments too thin to hold onto. There was the rock and sway of a wagon, wheels catching on uneven ground. There was cold air, then no air at all, like something had been placed over his face. There were voices speaking in low, clipped tones about dosage and containment, words that slid past him without sticking. Once, briefly, he thought he heard his own name, though he couldn't have said afterward whether that was real or something his mind had supplied on its own, desperate for anything familiar to hold onto in the dark.
Mondstadt noticed slowly, the way it always did with small absences before it noticed the large ones.
Mika noticed first. He kept track of who was in and out of the city, and by evening the courier route Lohen should have finished hours ago still sat unchecked on his ledger. He told himself Lohen had stopped somewhere, gotten distracted by a monster camp or a conversation or some contest of his own invention. It wouldn't be the first time. He checked the ledger three more times anyway.
Kaeya noticed next, when dinner came and went and the chair Lohen usually dropped into sideways, boots first, stayed empty. He didn't say anything at first. He finished his meal, made his usual rounds, and told himself Lohen had probably gotten caught up talking to someone on the way back, because that was the kind of thing Lohen did. He always found someone to talk to. It was only when the sun dropped low enough to turn the sky orange that Kaeya found himself standing at the western gate, arms crossed, watching the road for a familiar shape that didn't come.
Jean noticed last, in the sense that she was the one who finally said it out loud, quiet at first, the way she said most things she didn't want to be true yet. "Has anyone seen Lohen since this morning?"
.
.
.
.
.
Nobody had.
She asked Mika to check the ledger a second time, and when the entry was still blank she asked him a third, until he had to gently tell her that checking it again wasn't going to change what it said.
Within the hour she had knights fanning out along every road leading west, lanterns lit even though the sun hadn't fully set, because waiting until dark felt like giving something time it didn't deserve. Kaeya went with the first group out. Mika stayed behind to coordinate, pacing the length of his office so many times that Noelle asked twice if he needed anything, and both times he said no without really hearing the question.
Klee wanted to go too, and had to be talked down from it twice, once by Jean and once by Albedo, who found a way to make staying behind sound like an important assignment rather than a consolation. She sat on the front steps of headquarters instead, rocks forgotten, watching the road every time someone came through the gate. Varka arrived an hour after the search began, out of breath from having run most of the way from wherever he'd been, and didn't bother asking questions before joining the nearest group heading out.
Jean stayed at headquarters longer than she wanted to, coordinating routes and supplies, and it was well past midnight before anyone convinced her to sit down. She didn't sleep. She sat at her desk with a map of the western roads spread out in front of her, marking off searched sections one by one, and every time a group returned empty-handed she made herself ask the question again before they could answer it.
By the time the search parties went out with lanterns against a darkening sky, all that remained on the western road was a scattering of blood in the dirt. The courier bag's twin lay empty in the grass, tossed aside. There was no sign of the man who had carried it.
He woke to white light and the smell of something sharp and clinical. For a long, disoriented moment Lohen thought he might still be dreaming. The ceiling above him was wrong, too smooth and too bright, nothing like sky or stone or the wooden beams of a Knights' barracks.
He tried to move and found his wrists bound to whatever surface he was lying on. He reached, out of habit, for the familiar weight at his hip and his shoulder, and found nothing there: no spear, no dagger, no Vision.
The absence of it hit him harder than the restraints did. A cold, hollow space where the cryo energy usually sat, gone. He pulled against the bindings once, twice, and the sound that came out of him wasn't quite a shout.
Footsteps, unhurried, approached from somewhere behind his head, out of his line of sight.
"Ah," said a voice, mild and pleased in a way that made every instinct Lohen had scream at once. "You're awake already. That's earlier than I expected."
A face leaned into view above him, sharp-featured, faintly amused, studying him with open interest.
"My Vision," Lohen said, and was furious at how rough his own voice sounded. "Where's my Vision."
"Confiscated for now." The man, the doctor, some distant part of Lohen's mind supplied, remembering the words from the treeline, tilted his head, studying him with open, clinical interest. "You fought well, from what I'm told. Nearly got away, even. That's rare. Most people don't get that far."
"Where am I?"
"Somewhere no one is going to find you for quite some time, I'm afraid. I do hope you'll forgive the accommodations. They weren't built with comfort in mind." The doctor pulled a stool closer and sat, unhurried, in no rush at all. "I've read the reports on you, you know. Vice Captain of the Fifth Company. Very young for the position. Very reckless, even by the standards of your order. I find that sort of thing interesting."
"Interesting enough to kidnap someone over?"
"Interesting enough to want to understand better." He reached for something out of Lohen's line of sight, and the sound of metal against a tray made every muscle in Lohen's body go tight. "Don't worry. We'll start slow."
Lohen said nothing. He was too busy doing the only thing he still could. He memorized every detail of the room, the restraints, the man's face, filing it all away with the same precision he'd once used to catalog Hilichurl camps and bandit routes. Some part of him, even now, even here, was already planning how he was going to get out.
The doctor caught the direction of his gaze and seemed pleased by it. "You're already planning your escape. I can see it. Most people don't get that far along in their thinking, not this early." He set the instrument down on the tray with a small, deliberate click, letting the sound sit in the silence between them. "I'll admit, I'm looking forward to seeing how long that particular habit of yours survives."
"You'll be disappointed."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps you'll surprise me. Either way, I intend to enjoy finding out." He stood, smoothing down the front of his coat with the unhurried precision of a man who had never once in his life needed to rush. "Rest, if you can. You'll want the strength for what comes next."
The doctor smiled, clearly delighted by whatever he saw on Lohen's face.
"Let's begin, shall we?"