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The wind off the water still carried the cold like a blade, sharp enough to cut through torn fabric and worse, but Aether barely registered it anymore. His coat hung wrong on his shoulder where the seam had split open in the fighting, the cloth beneath it stiff with blood that wasn't all his. His boots were heavy with mud. Every step he took away from that clearing felt like it belonged to someone else's legs, someone he was only distantly steering from somewhere far behind his own eyes.
Behind them, the place where everything had fallen apart was already dissolving into the grey line of the coast, swallowed by fog and distance and the coming dark. He didn't look back at it. He didn't trust himself to.
Paimon drifted a little behind him instead of at his side, which was its own kind of wrong. She hadn't said much since they'd left — no complaints about the cold, no commentary on the terrain, none of the constant restless chatter that usually filled every silence between them before he even had the chance to notice it was there. Every so often she glanced over at him, quick and searching, like she was counting the seconds between his breaths just to make sure they kept coming.
"...We should stop soon," she said eventually, her voice smaller than usual. "You're not okay. Paimon can tell."
He didn't argue. He didn't have the strength to, and some quiet, tired part of him knew she was right anyway.
They found a stretch of higher ground a short walk further, tucked against a shelf of rock that broke the worst of the wind, close enough to the shoreline that the sound of the waves folded into the silence and softened its edges. It wasn't much, but it would hold through the night. Aether got a fire going without really thinking about it — his hands remembered the motions on their own, flint and kindling and the small, practiced patience of it, while the rest of him stayed somewhere else entirely. Somewhere back in that clearing, watching a face he knew better than his own crack open into something that had never belonged to her at all.
Rerir.
He didn't say the name. Not out loud. He wasn't sure his voice would survive it yet, and some stubborn, aching part of him wasn't ready to give the name that kind of power — the power of being spoken, made real again, after he'd spent so long refusing to believe it could be true.
Paimon settled across the fire from him, folding her small hands together in her lap, unusually still. By now, on any other night, she'd have already talked circles around him — about dinner, about how tired her tiny body was, about whatever nonsense crossed her mind first. Tonight she just watched the firelight move over his face, watched him stare into the flames like they might explain something the day itself hadn't.
"Are you hungry?" she tried, quiet.
"...No." His voice came out rough, unused, like he'd swallowed sand somewhere along the way. He realized, distantly, that he hadn't spoken since before the fight.
A beat passed before he looked up at her properly for the first time since they'd stopped. "...Are you?"
Paimon blinked, caught off guard that he'd asked at all. "Paimon's always hungry," she admitted, then softened it with a small shake of her head. "But that can wait. Paimon's more worried about you right now."
His shoulders dipped, just slightly, but she didn't push. She only drifted a little closer, close enough now that if he reached out, he could have touched her without moving much at all.
He didn't. Not yet. He wasn't sure his hands wouldn't shake if he tried.
So instead, they sat like that — the fire between them, the sea behind them, the whole enormous, exhausted weight of the day pressing down on his chest like something physical. Paimon didn't ask him to talk. She didn't ask him anything else at all. She just stayed, small and steady across the flames, and let the quiet be enough for both of them, for now.
By the time the fire had burned down to a soft bed of embers, Paimon had drifted into sleep in that sudden, unguarded way she always did — one moment still talking under her breath about something inconsequential, the next gone entirely, her small form still and even beside him on the bedroll. She'd settled close but not too close, giving him space out of habit, her tiny chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm that should have been soothing to listen to.
Aether lay on his back beside her, eyes open to the dark fabric of the tent above him.
His body ached in a way that went past the bruises, past the shallow cuts that had already started to scab over wrong under his sleeves. It was exhaustion all the way down to the bone, the kind that should have pulled him under the second he let his eyes fall shut. Every part of him that had spent the last stretch of days fighting, running, surviving, was screaming for rest. He could feel his own heartbeat in his temples, slow and heavy and entirely too tired to keep fighting anything anymore.
He didn't want to sleep.
It wasn't the first time. Since they'd come to this region, the nights had stopped being something to look forward to. Sleep didn't mean rest anymore — it meant the dreams found him again. Her voice, twisted into something that wasn't hers. Her face, smiling at him with someone else looking out from behind her eyes. He'd stopped being able to tell, in that first half-second of waking, which version of her had actually been real — the one he'd traveled beside for weeks, or the one that had never existed at all.
He turned his head slightly, looking at Paimon instead of the dark. At the small, familiar shape of her, undisturbed, trusting the night to hold still around her the way it always had. She fell asleep faster than he ever could. She always had.
He envied that tonight more than he wanted to admit.
Just a little longer, he told himself, eyes fixed on the shadowed canvas above. Don't close your eyes yet.
But his body didn't take requests anymore. The weight behind his eyelids grew heavier with every passing minute, the distant sound of the sea blurring softer and softer at the edges, pulling him down whether he agreed to it or not. He fought it for as long as he had anything left to fight with — long minutes stretching thin — until even the fighting itself became too exhausting to keep up.
Somewhere between one slow blink and the next, without ever really deciding to, Aether lost the fight and slid under.
And almost immediately, something was already waiting for him there.
The dream didn't ease him in. It never did anymore — it simply was, all at once, the way memory sometimes overtakes a person without warning.
He was back in the clearing. Not the version he remembered leaving hours ago, grey and empty and finally quiet — this one was still alive with motion, with sound, with her voice calling his name across a distance that kept stretching no matter how fast he ran toward it.
"Aether!"
Lumine's voice. His sister's voice, exactly as he remembered it, cracking with something that sounded like real fear. He could see her ahead of him, just barely, past shifting shapes of stone and shadow that kept rearranging themselves the way only dreams allowed. She was hurt — he could tell even from a distance, the way she favored one side, the way her hand pressed hard against her own ribs.
"I'm coming," he tried to call back, but the words came out smaller than he meant them, swallowed by distance.
He ran. His legs burned with an effort that never seemed to close the gap between them. Every step forward seemed to push her a fraction further away, like the ground itself didn't want them to reach each other. He caught glimpses — her hair catching the light, the particular way she turned her head when she was scared but trying not to show it, details too specific, too her, for his mind to have built out of nothing.
Then she fell.
He watched her go down hard, watched her reach a hand out toward him across the last stretch of ground between them, watched her mouth move around his name one more time —
And her face changed.
It happened the way it always did in these dreams now — not a slow transformation, not something he could brace for, but a single wrong instant where the face he'd spent his whole life memorizing simply wasn't hers anymore. Something older looked back at him instead, something that wore her features like a coat it had only just taken off, amused by how easily he'd run toward it anyway.
You always come when I call, it said, in a voice that layered itself wrong over hers, two things speaking at once. That's the trouble with you.
He tried to stop. He tried to pull back, to put distance between himself and the thing wearing his sister's face, but his legs kept carrying him forward on their own, some desperate, traitorous part of him still hoping — still needing — it to be her after all, even now, even knowing better.
"Lumine—" The name broke apart in his throat.
The thing smiled at him with her mouth, and reached for him with her hand, and behind it the ground opened into something dark and endless that hadn't been there a second before —
— and somewhere very far away, something was shaking his shoulder.
"Aether. Aether!"
The voice cut through the dark like a hand pulling him up out of water. He surfaced from the dream all at once, no gentle transition, just a sudden violent lurch back into his own body — and his eyes snapped open to darkness, his chest heaving, air dragging in and out of his lungs too fast to actually feel like breathing.
For one disorienting second, he didn't know where he was. His hand had already moved, fingers closing hard around something small before his mind caught up to what it was doing.
"H-hey — Aether, it's Paimon! You're safe, you're safe, let go—"
He blinked hard, and the shapes around him resolved slowly into the tent, the dark canvas above him, the last dying warmth of the embers outside. And Paimon, hovering close, one tiny hand braced against his chest where she'd clearly just been shaking him awake, her wide eyes fixed on his face with open alarm.
He realized, distantly, that he'd grabbed her wrist. He let go immediately, like he'd been burned, murmuring something that wasn't quite a real word.
His breathing wouldn't slow down. He sat up too fast, one hand pressing flat against his own sternum like he could physically hold his heartbeat in place, dragging in air that still didn't feel like enough no matter how much of it he took. Sweat had soaked through the collar of his shirt. His whole body was shaking, fine and constant, like something underneath his skin hadn't gotten the message yet that the dream was over.
"Hey — hey, look at Paimon, okay? Just look at Paimon." Her voice had dropped out of its usual pitch, softer now, careful in a way she rarely let herself be. She drifted closer instead of away, undeterred by how hard he'd flinched a second ago. "You're okay. You're here. It's just Paimon, and it's just the tent, and it's just the sea outside. Nothing else."
He looked at her because she asked him to. It took several tries before his eyes actually focused, before the small, familiar shape of her stopped doubling and swimming at the edges.
"...Paimon," he managed, barely more than a breath, like saying her name was the only anchor he had left.
"Right here," she said. "Paimon's right here."
For a long moment, neither of them said anything else. His breathing was still ragged, still too fast, but it had stopped climbing at least — hovering somewhere just short of panic instead of racing straight into it. Paimon stayed close, hovering at the height of his shoulder, her small hand resting hesitantly against his arm like she wasn't sure if the contact would help or startle him again.
"Do you..." she started, quieter than before. "Do you want to talk about it?"
He opened his mouth to say no. That was the automatic answer, the one that had gotten him through every night since they'd arrived here — swallow it down, say he was fine, let the silence do the rest of the work until morning came and gave him something else to focus on.
But nothing came out at all.
And then, without any warning he could name, something in his chest simply gave.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't dramatic. It was just a breath that didn't come out steady, a sudden tightness in his throat he couldn't talk past, and then his eyes were burning and his vision blurred and he was — he realized with a kind of distant, humiliated shock — crying. Really crying, not the controlled, private kind he sometimes let himself have alone, but the kind that shook his shoulders and stole his breath in broken pieces, the kind he hadn't let happen in front of anyone in longer than he could remember.
"I saw her," he choked out, barely words at all. "I saw her hurt, over and over, I thought — I really thought I could still — and it wasn't even real, none of it was ever real, and I still—" His voice broke apart entirely there, swallowed by another ragged breath.
Paimon didn't say anything right away. For a second she just hovered there, hands half-raised, looking utterly lost for the first time all night — like she'd run through every version of comfort she knew how to offer and none of them felt big enough for this.
So instead, she just closed the distance and hugged him.
It wasn't graceful. Her small arms barely reached around any real part of him, her whole body pressing into his chest with more determination than actual size, but she held on like she meant it with everything she had.
Aether went still with surprise for half a second — and then, just as suddenly, something in him seemed to loosen further instead of tensing up. He brought his arms around her carefully, like he was afraid of holding on too hard, and let his forehead drop against the top of her head as the last of it broke free of him — quieter now, but no less real.
Paimon didn't let go. She didn't say anything clever, didn't try to fix it with words. She just stayed exactly where she was, a small, warm, steady weight against him, letting him fall apart in her arms for as long as he needed to.
It took a while for the storm of it to pass. Slowly, his breathing evened out again, the shaking in his shoulders easing into something smaller, quieter, until he was just sitting there in the dark with his arms still around her, feeling strangely hollowed out and lighter at once, like something that had been pressing against his ribs for days had finally found somewhere to go.
He pulled back first, just enough to look at her, swiping the back of his hand roughly across his face. "...Sorry," he mumbled, voice still thick and uneven. "You shouldn't have to deal with — that. Any of that."
Paimon huffed, an indignant little sound that was almost, almost her usual self again. "Don't apologize," she said firmly, arms crossing over her chest even as she stayed close. "Paimon means it. You don't have to say sorry for that. Ever."
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, though it came out cracked around the edges. "...Still. Not exactly what you signed up for, following me around."
"Paimon signed up for all of it," she shot back, softer now, the indignation melting into something warmer. "The good, the boring, the really annoying parts where you don't talk for six hours straight — " that got the smallest twitch of a smile out of him " — and this too. Paimon's not going anywhere. You're stuck with her. Best companion in all of Teyvat, remember?"
That pulled an actual, quiet laugh out of him this time — small, worn thin, but real. He wiped at his face again, blinking the last of the wetness from his eyes. "...Yeah," he said. "Best companion."
"Paimon's glad you remembered," she said primly, though the relief in her voice was obvious underneath it, some of the tension finally easing out of her small shoulders now that he was, in whatever fragile way, smiling again.
The two of them settled back down after that, the bedroll shifting as Aether lay back against it with a tired exhale, the worst of the night finally, mercifully behind him. Paimon lingered close, drifting down to hover just above the fabric beside him rather than settling fully — waiting, maybe, to see if he wanted the space back now that the moment had passed.
He almost let her have it. His eyes were already heavy again, the bone-deep exhaustion from earlier creeping back now that the adrenaline had drained out of him. But some small, quiet part of him didn't want to close his eyes yet — not alone, not after that, not with the dream still sitting somewhere too close under the surface.
"...Paimon?" His voice came out smaller than he meant it to, almost shy, an odd thing to hear from him after everything that had just happened.
"Mm?" She turned toward him, attentive immediately.
He hesitated, looking somewhere just past her instead of at her directly, a faint color rising in his face that had nothing to do with the cold outside. His jaw worked for a second before any of it actually came out. "Could you... do the… thing?”
Paimon blinked — and then her whole expression softened, any confusion melting instantly into something warm and pleased. "Of course," she said, without a trace of teasing in it, already drifting closer. "Paimon was going to offer anyway."
She settled against him carefully, tucking herself into the space beneath his chin, her small back pressed to his chest as his arms came up around her without hesitation this time — easy, familiar, like this was a shape they'd found together more than once before. Her tiny face rested against him, and he could feel the steady little rhythm of her breathing settle almost immediately, grounding in a way words hadn't quite managed to be.
"Sorry," he murmured, quieter now, more out of habit than anything else.
"Don't be," Paimon said, muffled slightly against him, already half-drifting back toward sleep herself. "Paimon is happy helping you."
He didn't answer that — didn't trust his voice with it, not again, not tonight. But something in his chest eased at hearing it anyway, some last, quiet knot finally loosening as the sound of the sea folded in around them both.
He closed his eyes. This time, the dark didn't feel like something to fight.