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Lohen—you don’t like drinking. You know you don’t and probably never would, and yet, the bitterness of the alcohol is what makes you stay tethered in this moment; the burn making its way down is worse than the pain of pouring it across an open wound. Never you understand the point of doing this and why Varka insists on liking this sort of thing, but here you are, pouring the wine into your mouth like it’s the freshest water you can get your hands on.
A widening chasm in your heart is the source of this act. You who dislike not being in control over your own mind, you who dislike not having autonomy on your own body in any given time, taking a part in this sort of thing is a self-harm in the making; what prompt you to do this, anyway?
You take a swig of the wine in your hand again—a gulp to further make yourself even more miserable. You refuse to elaborate the whole story of what happened with your own words, with your own voice—either way, you don’t have any rights to say no when asked about the reason behind the justification of your act.
Here folks, the office that belonged to the Grand Master—former, might I add, because you are incapable of saying that he’s gone for good—is vacant for many months now. Never dusty, but empty, cleaned by the ever-trustful maid that is Noelle. His belongings have mostly been cleared, some collected by his remaining relatives, others given to those who want it or need.
This way, it gives way for new personnel to use room in his absence, the new Grand Master—Jean—declared it officially effective tomorrow but today, you barged into the empty office unannounced, a wine bottle in hand, to drink your fill to the sorrow you’ve been feeling all day.
(It’s a habit at this point; whenever you feel nostalgic or feel like grieving the past and him, you enter his office with a liqueur of your choice at night when everyone is gone, sit on the chair where he once sat all day working, then do nothing but soak in the loneliness that comes within the confine of this small office—there’s no difference with this time too, except for the fact that you know it’ll be the last time for you to be able to do this. There is no more tomorrow. Funnily enough, he robbed that from you too.)
In the room that is bereft of personal touch, you stare emptily towards everything—there is no more recreational books that the Grand Master tend to keep amidst the thick volumes of Chivalric Code of Conduct for the knights in his shelf. No more does you see a stack of paper on the bottom right of the rightmost shelf, for all letters addressed to him has been burnt away by your hands.
(You still remember Jean barging into your room, demanding explanation, and you gave her none at all, even as she became erratic and violent—never have you seen her so upset to the point of crying and yelling. No, somehow, it’s your first to see her like that and your first to cause that after years she maintained her calm self.)
(You still cannot make yourself say it to her. That you cannot bear seeing that letters for him being given to someone else, not even you. The impulse was to tear them apart, burn them away and you caved in, in hope that he could find comfort and read them again somewhere in the afterlife.)
(Jean refused to meet your eyes, yet her professionalism is commendable, because you would be murderous if you had to take care someone who made themselves as your enemy, subordinates or not.)
The table is devoid of paper; the loss of unsigned reports and stacked of proposals is apparent, the pen he uses to sign off his signature is nowhere to be found, the tankard and the flask containing his alcoholic beverage are no more too.
You know Varka used to keep a framed picture of himself with Crepus and Eroch, the one that he puts picture first down on the table. That one is gone too, gods know where, maybe buried together, you don’t want to know. You weren’t the one being given permission to arrange his belongings, so of course you wouldn’t know—hah, in the eyes of the law, you’re nothing but a stranger.
A stranger. The word is as bitter as the wine you’re about to drink again, as bitter as the laughter that escapes as you think about the insignificance of your presence in his postmortem.
(You didn’t shout. You didn’t throw a tantrum. Didn’t grow angry or petulant either. Only apathetic and numb, watching the casket getting lowered and lowered. By the time your body forced yourself to blink, all you saw was the burial hole covered and flattened with the surface of the ground, Cecilia flowers thrown all over, with you standing alone in the forefront of his grave.)
(You didn’t even cry when you knew he was gone. Sure as hell didn’t when the funeral ceremony was held. It wasn’t that you don’t want to, but rather—you couldn’t. You’ve lost the only place where you could hide your tears away if you happened to break apart; no more safe haven means no more tears to shed.)
(The lonesome grave couldn’t imitate the warmth he gave. When the sun shines so bright on the stone, turning it warm to your touch, it isn’t the same as being hugged by a human—to a certain extent, the grave is Varka, but it’s not him at the same time.)
You’ve asked to yourself again and again, the reasoning as to why Varka likes to indulge himself in alcoholic things, so much that it’s synonymous with his achievement as the Grand Master—maybe, maybe, he’s running away from something too, just like you right now; using the alcohol as a fuel, a chaser to remove the horror unknown; grief can be such horror, a quicksand that doesn’t understand, a gallery of empty canvas depicting your memories. Being left by people you love can get you to that level. Mourning can be spoken in the same breath as chasing away the memories of the dead to numbness.
With an ironic chuckle, you understand why some people developed alcoholism—why Varka values alcohol so much. Some feelings are too much for a person to handle, no? For once, the lack of control, the floating nothingness in your head is enough to dampen the nostalgia.
Insipid is the taste of the wine but you pay it no heed, taking big swigs straight from the bottle again. You’re tipsy already, humming absentmindedly a random tune, your head being lulled to a gentle void. One bottle you already downed earlier before this, the one in your hand right now is the second bottle for the day and almost half of it is gone.
Let me ask you, Lohen—what is there to hold on? Why keep drinking to something you hate? Why do you try to put a significant to every remembrance about him?
Everyone moved on already, did you know? Of course you do—you’re actively ignoring but you are not blind. The knights once assembled under his leadership has followed a new one, the relationships he built for the sake of his beloveds have been strengthened in his passing, and the nation he so dearly loved is in the age of peace; everything he wanted has been granted, albeit he couldn’t enjoy it.
If he was here to speak to you, Varka probably would answer that he doesn’t mind that—ever the selfless.
(That same selflessness was the one thing that got him killed in action. Protecting a no name knight from a fatal attack. Stupid, you think—in the end, we’re just the same, a bunch of stupid mortals.)
(It was cruel of you, Lohen, to say that what Varka did is expected to you, that he reaped what he had sown—being heroic, being himself truly. People had stared at you with disbelief over what you said, whereas it is a truth you used to hide all of your sadness.)
(You were asked to give a speech, knowing that you were close.)
(You refused. You said to others that everything’s one-sided—Varka was the one insisting everything was the exact line; a reason to save yourself from the public display of heartbreak.)
“All of you now is a history in itself, heralded by the nation as a hero, decorated in the ballads of the bards.”
The bittersweet wine reminds you so much of a kiss in the past—a fleeting, ephemeral thing—that you once share with Varka. You’re willingly to admit the grief now.
“Isn’t that great? That you are now loved by everyone?”
You try to savour the taste, the kiss that will never happen again, while the crimson of your eyes flick to the side, to the room that no longer houses his and your existence; the empty shelves devoid of trinkets and books, the empty side table near it that usually holds the gramophone he kept back from Fontaine, the paperless work table and the loss of his favourite quill pen, the small quilt you kept for overnight stays when he grew busy, the laughter that rang in midnight reverie, the quietude that lulled you to the comfort of dreams, the kisses you stole away from his lips—
(You remember dancing away amidst the mess of his office with Varka, the happiness you had—could have—with him if not for his act of heroism.)
“Archons—” This is where you laugh again, regret-tinged, a lament and despair. “I never tell him how I love him. I’m so stupid.”
You think about the resurfacing past as you continue to down the content of the bottle, trying so hard to drown in the nostalgia and grief—bottoms up to you and the memories of him, Lohen. Hope what you hold onto has a purpose in the end.
Perhaps you have fallen asleep and this is a dream. Or maybe, you wandered far and wide to somewhere god-knows-where and struck gold on being stuck with what is left of a leyline disorder.
Though, with a certainty, the mud that touches your knee-length, the branches and roots of the trees sprawling across your path is not something you find familiarity with; you doubt it’s still Mondstadt, since the forest isn’t this lush and neither does the mud settle this deep.
The edges of your mind are all blurred from the wine, yet, your feet go towards what you think is forward—with the dense foliage, you don’t know where you are going or where the path will take you, but you trudge on, onwards, until there is a clearing beholding a small cottage by an expanse of water, like a swamp or some sort.
Strange. The feeling in your heart is of contradiction—a heartfelt nostalgia towards something unfamiliar, a foreign apprehensiveness towards something familiar, a mixed feeling that toys around with your senses, unclear.
The cottage itself looks similar to one of the places you’ve visited, but you cannot name when or where. You just know you’ve been there, maybe for a summer retreat or an outing with your friends. Your memories are one disjointed thing, your mind isn’t sharp enough to recall something, gate-kept behind a wall of fog, but somehow it doesn’t irk you like usual, perhaps because you are too busy to stave off this feeling of heaviness in your heart.
Where was it, when was it, and with who? Those three constant questions swirl inside as you take a step closer to where the cottage sits, the branch under your foot snapping loudly, the undefined birds singing in the distance across the unknowns of the forest beyond the swamp, the sound of calm water, the heat of the warm sun—
“Everything reminds me of you, Varka.” Your mutter is small, almost imperceptible, disbelief and despair colouring your laugh. “I can’t escape you even for so long.”
It was the conclusion you reach after awhile of ruminating. Not the answer behind those three obvious, jarring queries but a conclusion that is disconnected, illogical; this isn’t like you, the act itself doesn’t look like an option you’ll take, but there is a growing recklessness after Varka left you for good.
You used to be sharp and aware and reliable, but it seems that when Varka died, he carried away a portion of you—your arrowhead sometimes grows so blunted that you cannot cut through your target and you put all the blame to your own inability to cope for the better.
You sigh, a low sound. Nevermind that.
The leaves under your steps are crunchy, the wind nonexistent despite there is perpetual motion in the swamp water, ebbing and flowing. The cottage seems to be a lonely structure, devoid of people and adjacent buildings or homes. Abandoned, but looked as if it’s still cared for—doesn’t that sound like someone we know?
Trespassing the back entrance of the cottage, you were about to put your hand on the knob, when you feel a presence behind you, so sudden it appeared that you cannot help your bodily reaction of pulling out your knife from its hidden compartment, turning around to stab this person by the jugular vein, only to stop short when you meet a pair of familiar eyes
The hue of this person’s eyes is incredibly blue—like the expanse of the cloudless, cerulean sky and the glittering ocean blue bordering the horizon, an artful gradient.
You cannot mistake the gentleness in his gaze, cannot mistake the fondness he holds; not when you are the most familiar with it, the bane of your existence, the most you love from him as a person, the ghost that ruins you for eternity—
You remember exactly this exact same situation, staring into the same cerulean eyes, but the person beholds them laughed back then, the sharp end of your knife meeting a dense barrier made out of elemental energy, preventing you from slicing his neck open. His gaze was apologetic, the laughter spilling was of nervousness too. The memory of that time with him was so clear in the forefront of your mind that you had to blink away the imaginary to see what you were shown now.
The owner of those vibrant blue eyes smiles to you—a face so familiar and loved by you that your heart sinks just seeing it—and you watch the knife nicks the skin on his neck slightly, drawing crimson flowing. If it wasn’t for your extreme control over your power, the person would’ve been dead.
Dead, for the second time. Dead by your powerless hands yet again.
The words in your mouth feels like soot, bitter and ashen. You cannot speak them out, a flapping fish—your lips open and close, again, and again, as your eyes couldn’t tear away from the vibrancy of his eyes. Alive. Very much so.
“Var … ka?” A stammer but it works—his name is uttered.
“I’m here.” He answers, his hands sneaking over to your hands and you let him drag them close to his cheeks, the act allows you to confirm their realness.
Warm. Human-like warm.
The first thing you do after that is to cry. Archons, it takes everything not to be miserable, to hold everything together, but the moment your heart swells at the confirmation of him being alive, the dam breaks apart—it was as if the seams around your heartbroken self is taken apart. You miss him. You miss him dearly, because death takes him so suddenly that you couldn’t believe he’s gone for a long, long time already.
“Varka.”
You speak of his name with disbelief, uncaring if this moment is only believable for a moment, what matters is that this dream, this illusion, whatever this is that you’re seeing, has the features that you start to forget in reality; the unblemished skies etched inside the windows of his soul, the warmth of the spring sun on his skin, the voice you’ve been wanting to recall for many, many times.
“It’s you, Varka.” You reaffirm again, voice wobbly, the knife falls down to the ground, forgotten. “You don’t know how much I wanted this—to meet you again.”
“Mm, I know. That’s why I’m here, sweetheart.” The grin Varka gives you makes your tears run even more—it’s been so, so lonely without him. “Because of you.”
“Please tell me you’re here to stay.”
“Of course.” ‘Varka’ agrees—it sounds so real, honest, too good to be the truth. “I’m here for as long as you want me to.”
“For as long as I want—” Your laugh is tinged with sadness. “You even sound like him.”
“You said you want to hear my voice again.” But his smile is still so kind, in return. “You were the one who wanted me to be here.”
“I did—I did, didn’t I?” You look down, to your feet, watching the droplets of tears falling to the ground, before you meet his gaze again. “I want—”
A mistake. A miscalculation. Because the sight of him makes you falter in your speech, renewing your sob as you lose control of your emotion—you couldn’t finish it, couldn’t find the sentence to even acknowledge, lost in the sight of those kind blue eyes. Too painful, too unbearable. This figure that takes Varka’s existence that gently guides you to a hug is similar to same one that you loved all these years, the same as the one buried 6ft deep under the ground that day and that fact hurts all over again; a dream so beautiful that it tramples the scabbed wound into making another fresh opening.
The arms that wrap around your body, the hand that tenderly ruffles your hair in hope to comfort you, the scent of freshly cut grass and Cecilia flower, the feeling of summer warmth—everything reminds you of days spent with him under the glimmer of stars over at Starsnatch cliff, of days where soft whistle of the wind is the love song, of days where his laughter and yours ring sonorously in sync.
“I love you, Lohen.” The dream has given you something so beautiful to behold. “I will always love you in the passing.”
“I don’t want you to leave.” A beat, a despair. “Please.”
Your love waiting to be said remains unsaid, lodged in your throat. You cannot bring yourself to end this farce with those words. Not now, not then. Never.
“ … Please.”
The dream doesn’t answer because you don’t want him to answer that. He isn’t real, yet the hug remains warm, so you indulge in it, regardless of things.
.
You wake up in the end, with no tears in your eyes, dry as the arid sands. Of course it’s all a dream. A very convenient, ephemeral reverie. The lump in your throat is of words left unspoken, but it doesn’t matter because you’ll live carrying those anyway. You cannot remove it, no matter how much you’ve tried, the recipient deaf to all sound.
You rub your right eye, trying to erase the nonexistent tears, sighing aloud. “The dream—maybe Boreas’ fragments were with him even after death after all … so much that it affects me.”
You get up from where you fell asleep, clearing out the empty bottles of wine on top of the table, putting them in the bin all crushed and frozen as if trying to erase your tracks, however sloppy it is. The mirror on the shelf reflects the dawn, the sunlight peeking, and you find yourself standing in front of it, feet innocently walking slowly.
The cerulean hue you so dearly loved stares back at you, when you gaze upon the reflection, albeit only one side on your right. It doesn’t quite shine compared to when it’s still on Varka—it is a gleam-less dead eye, no longer of use, no future is found when you peer into it with your functioning one, but whatever it is, you think this one suits you better; there’s no light at the end of this timeline for you, the eye is a perfect reminder for that.
“If you can hear me, whoever it was that made me dream that, be it Andrius or even you, Ursa, please—go to hell.”
No one answers. Only the loneliness does.
Done with staring uselessly, you walk over to the exit, a hand reaching out to open the door. The dim light of the hallway filters into the room and you look at the empty room that used to house his existence for one last time.
You don’t say good-bye. You can’t, anyway.
“You are out of your goddamn mind, Lohen. Blinding yourself like that just to keep his eye—you cannot even see with it, you’re making yourself suffering more and more—”
This was somewhere in the far past. Maybe a few days after he died. Or a week. The timeline blurred and remained unknown to this day, but it was a little while after his passing, I promise. The hospital light was hurting your eyes the moment you opened them. Even in the state of half-blindness, the brightness still pierced through your functioning eye rather harshly, so you closed your eyes, trying hard to ignore the glare coming your way from the entrance of your in-patient room.
“Mind your own business, Rosaria.”
The tell-tale of click-clacking heels were obvious in the absent of words—she stood right beside you, the dagger in her glare still felt even when you weren’t actively watching her.
“Oh, I was, until you desecrated his grave.” She pointed out, vehemence dripping so freely. “Let go of your obsession. Give me back his eye.”
“And what makes you the authority of things?” You replied and glared back, as poisonous as she was to you with his eye. “You don’t understand how I feel.”
“You’re not the only one who felt grief over him.”
That sentenced made you laugh hysterically to the point of crying blood—she won’t understand. Rosaria, whom the law acknowledged as Varka’s heir, will not understand you whose existence will never be acknowledged anywhere.
“This is the only memento I have of him.” You retorted. “The only way you’re getting it back is to kill me.”
“Lohen!”
The obvious ire in her tone rang coldly and dangerously as she drew her weapon.
“See?” You close your distance to the blade, even letting your cheek rest on it as you stared at your supposed-executioner in the face. “You can’t even kill me to get him back!”
“Archons—shut the fuck up!”
Your taunt is enough to further enrage Rosaria, that she ended up stabbing you non-fatally on your guts with her spear.
“You’re a coward, Rosaria.” The spear dug even deeper but you didn’t care. “He won’t be praising you for this futile attempt.”
When she ended up not being able to answer you, you laughed again, in pain, the mismatched eyes staring at her mockingly as a pair of knights dragged her away.
“You're sick in the head, Lohen!" was her last words before the nurses barged in and the door remained closed for hours.
She could not and would not do anything to harm you to the point of death. All she could give to you are verbal curses and empty threats—for Rosaria is a coward too, just like you.
Kaeya entered the room a few moments afterwards, when the situation was deemed cleared and you were given more painkillers than a human should have in their system. Your docile attitude scared him but he said nothing of sort, standing right beside your bed and staring with his one remaining eye. A kindred spirit? No. He felt differently to your predicament.
“If you carry a part of me the day you died, it should be fair that I get a part of you too, right, Varka?” Your thoughts were translated into a mutter that he could hear, eyes looking over to the side emptily.
“Rosaria was right—you’re sick in the head, Lohen, you know that?”
His answer was curt but laced with sympathy. Pitying, in fact, however crude it was.
“I know.”
Though, you couldn’t care less, closing your eyes in response, pretending to be blind to the rest of the world.
“Maybe I should pick up drinking, like he does.”