Archive of Our Own

Heyu Tea House smelled of jasmine and warm paper, and Venti had been sitting in it for most of the afternoon with exactly zero Mora to his name.

He wasn't worried. The sun was still high over Liyue Harbor, and the person he'd actually come to see did not take visitors in daylight. So he had settled by the window, accepted the first pot of tea like a gift from the heavens, and let the afternoon go soft around him.

Across the table, Xingqiu turned a page of his notebook, the tip of his brush resting against his lip. "You're humming again."

"Am I?" Venti said, delighted. "Terrible habit. It's the tea. It makes me musical."

"Everything makes you musical."

"A fair and astute observation, Master Writer."

Xingqiu's mouth twitched. He had a particular way of being amused that was almost entirely in the eyes. They had met properly at the Irodori Festival, where Venti had found out about Xingqiu’s pen name. That had immediately put Venti somewhere on Xingqiu’s radar of ‘people-to-remember’, even more so that he knew of his notoriously poor handwriting. How embarrassing!

Then had come Hu Tao's Lantern Rite dinner, and after that the poetry gala, and somewhere in the middle of all three Xingqiu had become sort of a well acquainted person with this peculiar bard in green.

The bill arrived on a small lacquered tray. Venti discovered something fascinating on the ceiling.

"Ehe," he said. "Funny story-"

"You are going to tell me you've misplaced your purse," said Xingqiu, already reaching for his own.

"Misplaced is generous. It's more that it departed. Possibly in Mondstadt. Possibly in a river." He pressed a hand to his chest. "But I refuse to leave a debt unpaid. Let me settle this in the finest currency I have: a song!"

"After the tea," Xingqiu said, setting down the coins. "I'll decide whether it's worth the price." He said, though his face bore a teasing grin. He glanced at the window, then back, and his voice stayed light. "Don't give the Mora a thought. Besides, after Hu Tao's dinner, Chongyun asked me whether I'd noticed anything strange about you."

Venti, mid-sip: "Did he."

"He did." Xingqiu set his cup down with great care. "I told him you were part of the family business, and that it was a secret to be left untouched."

Venti coughed tea into his sleeve. "Family business?"

"Please." Xingqiu raised one hand, and for a moment he did not look like a gentle young writer at all. He looked like the heir of the Feiyun Commerce Guild. "I'm not asking, and I won't. But I was at that dinner. I watched Xiao, who has not willingly shared a table with mortals in living memory, stand when you came in and not sit until you did. I watched how he spoke to you. Like you were someone to whom a great deal was owed."

Venti opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

"And then there's Mister Zhongli." Xingqiu's eyes crinkled, just slightly. "You two spent the entire evening not looking at one another. People who truly don't know each other look, you know. It was far too careful to be an accident."

"I see," said Venti faintly.

"The Guild has some very quiet clients and some very quiet operations. I assumed you were connected to one of them. A representative, perhaps, or someone whose name isn't meant to be said over a dinner table." He picked up his brush again. "So I told Chongyun to drop it. Digging in the wrong place could disturb something delicate. Business, or something larger than business. He's a good friend. He'll listen. I only thought you should know where things stand."

The funny thing was that Xingqiu had been right about every observation and wrong about every conclusion, and the wrongness was so much kinder than the truth that Venti did not have the heart to correct it.

"Thank you," he said, and it came out more sincere than he had planned. "I mean that."

"For what? I haven't said a thing."

"No," said Venti. "You haven't."

The second pot came, and with it the notebook came fully open. Xingqiu angled it toward him with the sheepish air of someone showing a work in progress.

"I'm drafting something new," he said. "I wanted to ask you about it, actually, since you've travelled. A story with a wind god in it. Not the Anemo Archon himself, you understand. He's only the inspiration for my main character. The concept."

Venti's hand stayed exactly where it was. His smile did too, which was the only reason it didn't slip.

"Ooh," he said. "A wind god. That's a far cry from your other book, isn't it? The one with the machines and the little glass ships that sail between stars. I heard that one was the talk of Inazuma. Fontaine too, people say."

"Yes." Xingqiu sighed into his cup, a small sound with a lot of history in it. "Everyone abroad is reading it. In Liyue it's a curiosity. People here nod politely and ask when I'll write something proper. I wish I could write one book that Liyue loves. Just one."

"Then why not write about the Geo Lord?" Venti said, and heard how it came out, a little too quick, a little too high. "Surely a Liyue story about Liyue’s own god would do wonderfully. Very, ah, local."

"There are hundreds about him already." Xingqiu didn't seem to find the suggestion odd. "Plays, ballads, the whole cycle. Every child in Liyue can recite the famous ones. Anything I wrote would be measured against all of them, and would only ever be one more." He turned his cup in his hands. "I want it to sell, but I want it to be novel. A god nobody here has bothered to imagine properly."

"And nobody has imagined the wind god properly?"

"Nobody has imagined him at all. I've gathered what I can. It falls into two camps." He ticked them off on his fingers. "The first is tavern talk. A god who sleeps through everything, drinks on the job, and has never done a day's work in his life. Slothful. A joke."

"That one," Venti said, with great dignity, "is slander."

"Is it?" Xingqiu glanced up, amused. "The second is the Church. A solemn guardian who watches without rest and gave up his own freedom for his people. There's an entire doctrine about what he would and wouldn't approve of. I read their commentary on his views on freedom. Forty pages. It reads like a list of rules."

"That's a long book," Venti said slowly, "for something that's supposed to be about being free."

"Yes. That's what bothered me." Xingqiu tapped the page. "Neither version seems like a person. One is a joke and one is a statue. And if the Church is right, then freedom is something you're ordered to keep, which seems to defeat the point. Does it sound right to you? You've been to Mondstadt. You've heard how they talk about him."

Venti had heard how they talked about him. Of course he had. In taverns, in the cathedral, in the rhymes the children skipped to in the square. He thought: the lazy one is closer, and I'm not even offended. He thought: the other one sounds exhausting. I would not like to meet him.

"It sounds noble," Venti said, and poured himself more tea. "Very noble. Everyone would believe it."

"But?"

"Did I say but?"

"You tilted your head."

Venti laughed, and meant it, mostly, giving a disarming grin. "You've got a good head on your shoulders young man! So observant!"

“You aren’t that old yourself, no?” Xingqiu commented lightly.

Venti smiled lightly. Did his form really make him look that young? Jeez…

A small, bright, repeating trill, three notes, then the same three again. Venti glanced toward the window without meaning to. Down in the street, a vendor had hung a bamboo cage from his awning, and in it sat a thrush, small and brown and perfectly healthy, singing the same phrase over and over because there was nothing else for it to do.

Someone laughed and tossed a coin to the vendor. The bird kept singing.

The latch clicked as the vendor adjusted the cage, and for a moment Venti was not in a tea house at all.

There were walls. There was a sky that sat low and deep blue over everything, and a wind that refused to move, and a voice somewhere that said, not unkindly, not kindly either, sing.

He blinked.

The tea house was still there. The jasmine. The paper. Xingqiu, watching him with his brush still in his hand, not looking at the window at all.

There was a clenching in his chest.

"The song seems stuck," Venti said, and his voice came out almost normal. "Poor little thing. Three notes. You'd think it'd get bored."

Xingqiu didn't answer at once. When he did, it was gentle, and sideways. "I've always thought a thing like that sounds more like a clock than a song."

"Yes," said Venti, blinking at how Xingqiu seemed to echo his words. "That's it exactly."

Xingqiu closed the notebook and set it aside. He did not say are you all right. He picked up the teapot and refilled Venti's cup, and then, after a moment, quietly turned his chair so that his shoulder blocked the window.

Venti looked at the cup. Then at the shoulder. Something in his chest eased a notch.

"Some gods," he said, slowly, and was surprised to hear himself say it, "wouldn't want to be written as the one who stayed." He turned the cup in his hands. "Maybe he'd want to be written as the one who could have left."

Xingqiu was quiet for a long moment.

"Then perhaps," he said, "that's the better chapter."

It was after much debate over whether the author's stated intention matters once a book is published, or does the text belong entirely to the reader's interpretation that Xingqiu began to notice the sky turning darker.

"You owe me a song," he added, a little later.

"Do I?"

"I did say I'd decide."

"And have you?"

"I have. Who wouldn’t want a song from the best bard in Mond’?"

“Well then, I shan’t delay any longer!” Venti took a breath, summoning his lyre. He had a silly one ready, a limerick about a dragon who couldn't find his socks. It was one of his best funny ones. 

He opened his mouth.

What came out instead was a melody with no words.

It was an old Mondstadt tune, the kind that was older than the city's walls and no longer had an author. He sang it low, and it climbed, and turned over itself, and wandered off toward the last verse, the one everyone had forgotten, and then, just at the edge of it, he let it go.

The note hung in the air. It did not resolve.

Xingqiu didn't say anything. He didn't take notes. He only sat and listened with his hands folded, the way you might listen to a person confiding something you had been trusted to hold.

"That's all," Venti said at last. He was smiling, or doing a good impression of it. "It's unfinished."

"That's all right," Xingqiu said. "Some things are better that way."

The door banged open.

"Xingqiu!"

Chongyun skidded to a halt beside the table, slightly out of breath, flushed from the sun and the run across the harbor. His eyes flicked to Venti, and then away, very carefully, like a person walking around a puddle. "I finished drill early. There's a new stall by the docks that sells shaved ice with, um, three kinds of syrup, and I thought..."

"Of course you did," Xingqiu said, and the whole shape of his face changed into something warmer. "Give me a moment to pack up."

Venti was already on his feet.

"Oh, I should be going." He swept his beret from the table with a flourish. "Duty calls, and so do several other things. Thank you for the tea, Master Xingqiu. The song is yours."

"The song," Xingqiu agreed, "is more than enough."

"And Zhenyu?" Venti paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. The late light caught in his hair, as the wind seemed to mute the sounds around them besides Venti’s voice. "Keep writing."

Xingqiu immediately startled at the use of his penname, conspicuously looking around to see if anyone heard that, but thankfully everyone seemed to be deaf today.

He was gone before either of them could answer, a flicker of green and a breath of wind that rattled the paper lanterns on its way out.

Chongyun frowned at the empty door. "That was..."

"Family business," Xingqiu said serenely. "Don't."

Chongyun nodded, very quickly.

After a moment, he added, almost to himself: "And a friend."

By the time night had properly fallen, the street below the tea house was quiet. The vendor had packed up his stall and gone home, leaving the cage hanging beneath the shuttered awning with a cloth draped over it for the night.

Venti stood across the way for a while, hands in his pockets, listening. Under the cloth, the three notes had faded to a sleepy chirp.

He did not make a show of it. A breath of wind, no more than a draft along the cobblestones, that slid up the awning post and found the latch and nudged it, gently, the way you'd nudge a sleeping friend. The little wire door swung open.

The cloth shifted. A pause. Then a small brown shape slipped out, hesitated on the rim of the cage, and launched itself over the rooftops with a clatter of wings. Three notes, rising. Then, for the first time, a fourth.

In the morning, the vendor would scratch his head and decide he hadn't hooked the latch properly. Nobody would ever know.

Venti watched until the bird was only a sound, and then not even that.

"There," he murmured. "Now it's up to you."

Wangshu Inn sat on its cliff above the sea of clouds, lantern-lit and quiet, the last diners long gone to their rooms. Venti had claimed the highest roof an hour ago, legs dangling over the edge, humming to himself and watching the lights below go out one by one.

He didn't hear anything arrive. There was only a soft shift in the air, and then a figure was simply there, crouched on the ridge a few paces away, perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet, as though he had been sitting there all evening and Venti had only now noticed.

"Lord Barbatos." Xiao's voice was low, and his head was already bowed. "I did not expect to find you here."

"Oh, you know. Just a humble bard wandering around." Venti shrugged, grinning. "It's been a while."

"It has been too long." Xiao did not look up. He stayed in his crouch, fixing his eyes on a point somewhere near Venti's brown loafers. "You should have sent word. I would have prepared..."

"What, a rug?"

A pause.

"...Perhaps," Xiao admitted.

"Xiao, sit. Please. You're hovering like I might bite."

"It is not my place–"

"I'm asking,” Venti said, and gave the sweetest smile he could master.

Xiao hesitated, then lowered himself onto the tiles. He did not sit beside Venti but a careful, formal distance away, knees drawn up, back straight. He had chosen the highest point of the ridge, with a clear view of every approach, like a cat settling on the top shelf where nothing could reach it.

His gaze dropped to the paper parcel in his hands. He seemed to weigh something. Then, without looking, he set it on the tiles and nudged it across the gap with two fingers, slowly, the way a cat pushes a cup toward the edge of a table.

"You look as though you have not eaten. Forgive me." His voice dropped. "It is nothing. Take it, if you wish."

Venti unwrapped it. Almond tofu, still cool.

"Xiao," he said softly.

"It is nothing," Xiao repeated, to the clouds, with a faint flush rising at the tips of his ears. "I was also told someone had been paying for your tea."

"News sure travels," Venti hummed unassumingly.

"A mortal paid for the Anemo Archon's tea," Xiao deadpanned, and there was something stiff and offended in it, as though a great discourtesy had been done and he had not been there to prevent it.

"A friend paid for a humble bard's tea," Venti corrected, delighted, around a mouthful. "He's a writer. He thinks I'm secretly an operative of the Feiyun Commerce Guild."

There was a long, profound silence.

"He is wrong," said Xiao at last, "in a manner that serves you."

His gaze slid to the side, where two small birds were darting about at the edge of his vision. His head tracked them before he could stop it, pupils sharpening, shoulders gone very still. He dragged his attention back with visible effort. "It is as well."

They sat. The wind moved over the cliff, and it was Venti's wind, the way it always was, and for once it didn't need to be any more than that. The tofu was very good. Below, the last of the inn's lights went dark. Xiao had drifted a hand's breadth closer without seeming to notice, and Venti was careful not to mention it.

"You are quiet," Xiao said eventually.

"I'm eating."

"You are quiet and eating. It is not a usual combination, my lord."

Venti rested his chin on his knee. "There was a bird today," he said. "In a cage. It sang the same three notes over and over."

Xiao did not ask what happened next, because he was not the kind of person who needed to. After a moment he said, "You opened it."

"I opened a latch. The rest was up to the bird."

"Was it?"

Venti turned his head. Xiao was still looking at the clouds, profile hard and unreadable, one hand loose against his knee.

"The Church has written probably forty hundred pages about what I'd say," Venti said. "Mondstadt thinks I'm either asleep or a statue. And all I can think is that nobody has ever asked what I'd do, if I left."

"Would you?"

"Not today."

"Then it is enough to say it for today." Xiao spoke slowly, picking each word like a foothold. "A wall that shelters a city and a wall that imprisons a man may be built of the same stone. What matters is not the stone, but whether the door may be opened from the inside. A bond may bind, and still be kept by choice. A contract is only a chain if one is not free to read it again tomorrow."

Venti went very still. Then, slowly, he began to smile.

"Xiao."

"...Yes, my lord."

"That is extremely Morax."

"It is not," said Xiao, a little too fast.

"The bit about the stone. And the contract. He said that to you, didn't he? Probably over tea. Probably while pouring it."

"I..." Xiao's ears had gone a deep, undeniable red, and it was spreading down his neck. "That is..." He glanced away and began smoothing his shirt with enormous concentration, like a cat that has just fallen off a sofa and intends to pretend it was intentional. "It is sound advice regardless of its source."

"It's lovely advice," Venti said warmly. "I'm only saying, I can hear him in it."

"I have simply retained certain teachings," Xiao muttered at his sleeve. "You will not repeat this."

"My lips are sealed. Mostly."

Xiao made a sound somewhere between a huff and a hiss. But after a moment, when Venti leaned, carefully, until his shoulder rested against Xiao's, he did not move away. He sat stiff as a board for a long, visible, internal struggle, and then, very slightly, the tension went out of him. His eyes slid shut in a slow blink, the nearest thing to trust a cat knows how to say.

Somewhere far off, so faint Venti might have imagined it, three notes rose over the dark, and then a fourth.

Venti smiled, ate the rest of his almond tofu, and hummed the unfinished tune until the stars came out.