Chapter Text
Katsuragi's hands are worn, calloused from many years of smithing. They are covered in brown and bright violet. He swings a billet out of the forge and it is a bright, brilliant orange. He's asked him before at what point the metal turns reflective. Katsuragi had smiled, the way one does at a small child, and said that the mirrored shine of a fresh sword came from hard work rather than any innate quality of the metal.
"There's a new one," he says. "On your arm." He taps the equivalent spot on his own, spotless, bicep.
Katsuragi turns to admire the spot of violet he'd pointed out. He has never understood why he's so enamored with them.
"I hope she's alright," Katsuragi says with a wistful sigh.
His soulmate, he'd explained once. Wounds are shared between connected pairs as bright colors on the healthy party– he's always thought it a crude and inelegant system. What does it matter if you can tell when your soulmate's hurt if you haven't even met them? And how are you even supposed to confirm a match?
Katsuragi has always dismissed these concerns. He says it's all very romantic. He says there's nothing quite like knowing the perfect person is out there somewhere. He says it makes him hopeful for a happy future, no matter how bad the current moment may get.
He glances at the billet, forgotten on the anvil. The metal's going to be a nightmare to work with if he leaves it out much longer.
~
Not so long after that, he finds himself standing over Katsuragi's body. He does not weep.
A patch of brilliant violet blooms on the side of his face, now so unnaturally still. Kunikuzushi- for that is his name, now- does not weep for the girl whom it belongs to either. He hopes, fleetingly, that she is tenacious enough to bear this, because otherwise he doesn't think he'd have any respect for her at all. The moment passes, and he never thinks of that violet girl again.
~
No colors have ever appeared on him. He has been assured that this is normal, that as an immortal his soulmate likely hasn't been born yet.
He hates it. Not because he is alone but because people insist that he cannot be alone. He feels pity for those who wait for soulmates, really. It must be horrible to see oneself as so incomplete. He is, of course, perfect. He carries within himself the essence of the divine. He needs nothing, no one, else.
And yet– he longs for it. He wants to be imperfect. He wants to be unclean.
The first time he kills someone, he dips his fingers in the pool of their scarlet blood and drags them across his face. The lines are red, and then they are brown, and they flake off as if they were never even there at all. He does not try that again, but continues to relish in the blood that happens to fall on his hands.
Sometimes, he looks up at the night sky– lousy with creeping white stars– and it makes him feel oddly homesick. He does not know why.
~
There is a story about the first woman in Teyvat. They say that she'd fallen in love with her own reflection, that nothing could tear herself away from her own image. To right the course of nature, Celestia had given her the first soulmark, so that she could admire her soulmate's reflection instead of her own.
He thinks this might be the only story, really, that in a sense there are no other stories. Every story is a version of this one, just another reflection of a reflection until none of them mean anything at all.
~
He lives to see a lot of moments. He remains, if only physically, pristine through them all.
He's killed again tonight– he cannot be bothered to remember what number this victim is. It was a staged carriage accident, this time, and afterwards he'd fished through their pockets for a small letter they'd written that could potentially draw unwanted attention to his guilt. He pulls the letter out his own pocket, now, a safe distance away from the wreck, and tears it into tiny pieces before throwing those into a stream. Once he's done, he leans down to wash the blood he'd gotten on his hands in the process.
It's close to midnight. The moonlight makes his hands look strangely silver.
~
He has been terribly bored lately.
"Please," sobs the woman on the ground in front of him. She is the last of the Hyakume line. "I only just got married to my soulmate- we haven't had enough time-"
Eliminating the Raiden Gokaden has always been something he does just for the sake of it, he thinks, raising his sword. The woman wails.
"Please- if it's money you want, take everything, just please spare my husband-"
Her husband is already dead in the next room. He's gotten offers from a strange doctor to join a foreign organization, recently, and he thinks he might accept. It looks more interesting than this has ever been.
He brings the sword down right on top of an orange mark he left on her husband. She does not die immediately, but is left too weak to protest as he leans down and pulls a beautiful jade ring off her finger– he's heard it was an engagement gift from her husband. She's dead before he can even pocket it.
On his way out, he grabs handfuls of everything that looks valuable, and knocks over a few pieces of furniture for good measure. Nobody will suspect anything other than a home invasion.
He walks out the front door. Il Dottore is there waiting for him. The moonlight reflects off all the harsh edges of his mask, leaving strange patterns on the ground.
"Is this what destroying a country means to you?" He asks.
"Maybe," he replies. Inazuma is, he supposes, his home, and a very important part of its culture died with all the bodies he'd left behind. Is it right, then, to say that the Inazuma that had left him to fend for himself is really the same Inazuma that exists in the wake of his actions? And in that case, what about his–?
"It doesn't matter. I'm accepting your offer."
~
His routine with the Fatui is mostly unchanged, but he finds his life generally more interesting and therefore enjoyable. His coworkers are all insufferable, the pay is enough to buy a small country with, and the fact that the Goddess of love herself so detests the soulmate system brings him no small amount of pleasure.
Sometimes, though, he looks out at the snow refracting the moonlight into a million tiny pieces and gets the strangest feeling. It is not guilt, not quite, but more like-
It is like watching a play when you already know the ending. You watch the characters play out their roles, delivering moving monologues about how they will guarantee themselves their happy ending, all while knowing the curtain closes on their cooling corpse. It is like knowing something terrible is going to happen, something that it is already far too late to stop.
And then it passes, and he is his typical self again. He is always left a little off-kilter after those moments, as if the feeling did not belong to him at all.
~
He does not like to stay very long at Zalopany palace. Given the circumstances of his existence, he figures that he should probably enjoy living in a God's abode, and yet nothing can change the fact that he lived as a wanderer for hundreds of years. The wide open sky will always feel more like home to him than opulence.
On the rare occasions on which he is obliged to go, he gets through it by admiring the place's exquisite architecture, and tricking himself into half believing he's in some kind of museum rather than the seat of an archon. There is one wing in particular, home to a hall of mirrors, that he particularly likes to visit.
It's usually empty- mirrors do not make for great insulators, and nobody likes to be colder than they have to be in the heart of Snezhnaya. He's naturally more resistant to those sorts of things, and so he often finds himself standing there for hours on end.
There are lots of superstitious folk stories about mirrors. People do not like to see their own reflections, which he finds funny given how they speak so highly of how they reflect on their soulmates all their lives.
Even still, he's forced to admit there's something strange about them when faced with so many. He stares at his reflection, and sees it reflected in his eyes, and that reflection reflects across the room, and the reflected reflection is reflected in his eyes, and it all feeds into itself until he is no longer confident he can tell what's real.
He snaps out of one such trance late into the night, several hours after walking out of a meeting early. He'd felt… off, somehow, and now he cannot help but feel something is wrong with his reflection.
He stares into his eyes for one more, long, moment. The snow outside makes everything quiet. He can find nothing amiss with himself, with the reflected version of himself.
He turns to leave, and spots a flash of something in the mirror as he does. Slowly, he raises his right hand in front of his face. He lets it sit there for a moment, before turning it over in one sharp movement.
There is a patch of silver on the base of his palm.
He has always thought himself the hero of his own tragedy, but now he cannot help but see himself in the spurned lover; the one who dies when looking into her own, beautiful, reflection in the surface of a deep pool of water.
Fate has always lived to taunt him. This time, he promises himself, things will be different.
~
More marks appear. Big ones, little ones; ones that lightly dust his knees, tiny slashes on his hands, clusters of silver-white speckles.
They disgust him. He feels he is not himself, that he is simply a canvas for someone else's desires. He wants to throw up. He wishes he could tear off his skin and crawl out of it, free to walk into a brave new world alone. He does not want to, can not, deal with them. He's had this feeling before, and was able to change himself then, but this time the problem is not anything he can control. He is somebody else's mirror, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. This, he knows, cannot be allowed to continue, but he isn't sure what he's supposed to do.
He cannot help but try and cover them up sometime, through clothes or by replacing them with dark purple bruises of his own affliction. He stops doing that once he realizes that the person on the other end might interpret it as a sign of comfort and affection.
He ignores them, when he can. Nothing can erase the knowledge that they exist.
~
He has never been one to fight on the front lines, preferring to play his games in shadows (where no one will notice a murderer). Flashy work, when it's required, is left to Capitano or Arlecchino while he slinks about in the background assassinating whatever powerful figures need assassinating.
Sometimes, though, he likes to walk through the aftermath of great battles. Nobody ever talks about what becomes of a battlefield– the glory and horror of war is all over, and all that remains is the quiet and unspeakable aftermath.
He wanders, quite aimlessly, until he comes across the body of a young man with an empty vision and cracked, but still reflective, shield. His dream, whatever it was, has ended, but he does not think it matters. He died doing what he presumably loved, and he cannot imagine finding anything but happiness in that.
Another boy, besides him, carries an emerald mark of the arrow wound that had killed him. Their hands are intertwined.
Did they have parents, he wonders for a moment. Of course they did– everyone has parents. The more interesting question is, did they love them? Did they tuck their children into bed at night, kiss them on their foreheads, and tell them stories about the person they were fated to be with? Were they ecstatic when their two sons met, happy in the knowledge that their own child would now be happy as they were? Or were they like–
He supposes it does not matter, because the people before him are dead and he is alive. If their mothers loved them, it will only make things worse for them now. Grief can only exist when it follows love.
He looks at his own hands. There is a little silver nick on his thumb, and another more globulous shape on his forearm. He reaches down, and pricks his finger on the sharp edge of the man's broken shield. The blood that bubbles out is bright red.
He has often been told he is beautiful. The compliment has led him to much self-destruction. He does not want to be anything to anyone, cannot bear the weight of another stranger's expectations.
He looks at his reflection in the broken mirror, and watches himself as he presses his thumb to his neck as hard as anyone could possibly bear it. Never letting up on the pressure, he drags it all around the circle of his neck until he wears a complete necklace of deep-blue bruises. He'll be sore for a few days, and then completely fine, but if you only saw it's mirror image-
It is very difficult for humans to avoid all the little injuries that come along with living. Everyone gets a paper cut, or sick, or stubs their toe from time to time.
But he's not human. He carries himself with a sublime amount of grace and poise. The little accidents that come with living are easy to avoid for one who has never really lived.
"Goodbye," he tells his reflection. It does not reply.
~
It is easier than he expected to avoid any and all injury, and harder than he'd expected to ignore the patches of silver that resolutely continue to crop up. The strangest of bruises crop up on his torso, and he cannot help but wonder what had caused them even though he knows it isn't something he should allow himself to consider.
The only real consequence seems to come when the Tsaritsa asks to speak with him. She usually hands out her orders through paper or Pierro, so he knows that somehow she knows.
He arrives, and his steps echo loudly through the dark and empty hall. The Tsaritsa watches him silently from her throne at the end of the room. He reaches her, and pauses, but does not bow. A very long time ago, he swore that he would never demean himself for a God again. He doesn't know if she knows about that, but either way she has never seemed to mind his lack of respect.
"You would throw away that which people die for?"
"Yes," he says. She considers that for a moment, absentmindedly drumming her long nails on the arm of her throne.
"And you would still follow my orders?"
"Yes."
She thinks for another minute, looking out of the massive window beside her towards the snow-covered landscape. The night is still quite young, and the moon is only just barely beginning to rise up over the horizon.
"Then I suppose I have nothing more to say to you."
~
There is a little star near the inside of his left elbow. He cannot help but wonder if it is an act of self mutilation, or a hackneyed attempt at communication, and cannot decide which would be worse.
That night, he dreams of it. He does not remember it come morning, but nonetheless wakes up to discover himself crying.
~
The Tsaritsa sends him to Fontaine. There is a certain politician, he's been told, who's taken up a strong anti-fatui position. Naturally, he'll have to be taken care of.
Fontaine is a beautiful country, the people far less so. The man he's here to kill is so horrible to his staff that he'd slipped in without anyone suspecting anything– the turnover rate is too high for those who remain to be anything other than grateful for a stranger taking some of the load off their hands. Most of them do not even notice another person has shown up.
The mansion he lives in is opulent, and grand, and completely devoid of any signs that anyone actually lives there. There is a single painting of the politician and his wife where she looks extremely unhappy, and nothing to indicate that any of their several children or grandchildren exist.
There is a certain poison that, although not fatal in single doses, is remarkably good at mimicking the signs of illness when taken over multiple doses. After a few weeks, the victim will die without anyone suspecting anything other than a bad cold. He takes no small amount of pleasure in mixing it into the politician's tea.
After several days, it's clear the man is ill. After a few more, he's already on his deathbed. Not once does he ask to see his family, and not once do they come to see him.
The head maid injures her hand stoking the fire, and the master of the house pulls together the last of his limited strength berating her until she cries.
He dies the next morning, and he takes his opportunity to slip away. As he does, he spots the maid's injury on the hand of the new widow.
He normally does not feel any sort of way about his killings, but this time, a smile cannot help but make its way to his face.
~
A few years later, he returns to Fontaine, not for an assassination this time but a grand gala. The more suitable harbingers had been busy with other things, so the role of the face of the Fatui had fallen to him. There's a new member of their company, the recently appointed eleventh, but he is still much too bloodthirsty for events like this that require a bit of social tact.
He hates parties like these– he finds them all to be the same. People gravitate towards him because he's pretty and then make an excuse to leave upon realizing the amount of blood on his hands. Usually, he's obliged to hide this, but all he's here to do tonight is remind people that the Fatui are around and scary.
He leaves while the night is still young, having done his job and wanting very much not to linger. Rather than return to his hotel, though, he sneaks off into the countryside and hikes to the top of a small waterfall.
Night has solidly fallen, and the sound of rushing water seems to somehow compliment the stars. He has always had a cynical streak running through him, but tonight he cannot help but think that the sky looks terribly pretty.
Unbidden, he wonders if somewhere out there his soulmate is looking at these same stars. He does not know if the thought delights or scares him more.
~
He does not measure the passage of time. He does not need to– nobody who's lived as long as he has does. Unlike some of them, though, he also does not want to. One day, he will wake up pristine, and from then on never be taunted by another silver mark again. He will, that day, be free.
He doesn't know what he'll do, then. He thinks he will force himself to rejoice for fear of considering any other possibilities.
~
He returns to Snezhnaya late one evening, having come all the way from Sumeru (where a young researcher had gotten himself a little too tangled up in Fatui interests), and immediately collapses into bed. He doesn't need sleep as much as real people do, but he still enjoys it immensely.
When he wakes up the next morning, he cannot help but feel like something is off. He scans the room carefully, and then himself, but cannot locate anything amiss.
With a sigh, he gets up, and starts to get ready. He goes about his whole routine, still feeling strange, right up until he catches a glimpse of his reflection. The silver mirror of somebody's black eye rings the whole left side of his face. He curses under his breath, then takes to digging through his drawers for the standard issue Fatui mask he'd tossed in one of them and then forgotten.
He finds it eventually, and fortunately it covers everything he needs it to– he's supposed to meet with Pierro later, and does not want to herald any meaningless questions. He storms out of his room, and the rank and file that he does happen to pass are all too afraid to even look at him, let alone bring up any departures from his typical routine.
Pierro is not so cowardly, but he is also more professional. He allows himself a second to stare at the mask before getting right to business.
"There's something happening in Mondstadt," he says.
~
The situation, as per his briefing, involves a number of strange meteorites with even more mysterious powers. He is to figure what they are, and if they can be taken advantage of. Additionally, he's told there's a certain up and coming honorary knight he should look to eliminate if at all possible. He's not really sure why Pierro had picked him specifically for this, but it seems interesting enough and so he has no reason to turn it down.
And so, several days and a healed eye later, he finds himself close to the border between Mondstadt and Liyue making light conversation about meteorites with the traveler he's supposed to kill. It's only a secondary objective, sure, but assassination is something he has never minded (and is very, very good at it).
Because he's so good at it he knows now is a bad time. The honorary knight makes a living as an adventurer, and so he does not doubt that an opportunity will come to pick them off when they're more isolated.
For now, though, he ponders the mysterious meteorites with the ability to trap people inside a dream. He's heard it said that Gods alone are capable of dreaming, that they take on that burden for their subjects. Only vision holders, with their tiny pieces of the divine, can carve out some small dream for themselves.
He wonders, again, why Pierro sent him here. The Jester knows a lot more than he lets on– he definitely had some idea that dreams were involved here.
He, by contrast, has long abandoned any dreams of his own. All that remains is their beautiful, but empty, husk.
(This morning, he woke up with silver bruises scattered across his knees).
~
He next sees the traveler far from any military forces, just as he'd hoped he would. The time is ripe for a murder. He can practically smell it in the air.
There is a girl he doesn't recognize with them– and a vision holder, no less– but he writes her off entirely. Those brave and impassioned enough to try and fight him are simply witnesses he can dispose of in a timely manner.
-Is what he would like to say about her, but as he approaches he cannot help but stare. There is something about her, something in the way she moves, that makes her feel like a faerie and him an enchanted hunter. She does not quite seem like she belongs– to this group, to this world, and it is a feeling he gets so strongly it becomes undeniable. But he has a job to do, and so he ignores it as best he can.
"Looks interesting! Mind if I join you?"
The stranger turns to face him. She has a round, pale face, like the moon. Her eyes, the color of tide-tousled seaglass, are wide as she reaches for her companions and teleports them to safety. He blinks, and all that is left of her is a wide magic circle made of hydro and runes he does not know how to read.
… He has seen many things in the course of his tired existence, but he could never have predicted that. He is, he hates to admit, entranced. He regrets writing her off now, for if anything, the feelings of curiosity he nursed have fully matured into real, painful, desire. It's nothing serious, really, but yet it's something he'll think about for a while yet.
He still has work to do, unfortunately, and his subordinates are looking at him expectantly, and so he promises himself as fervently as he can manage that he'll investigate her later; and in the meantime orders them to continue researching the meteorites. Before he leaves, he takes one final look at the spot where she'd stood, and pretends like he can still see the effigy of her magic.
~
There is something else about her, something he can't put his finger on. She's a strange sort of girl, naturally, if she'd seen through his ruse that quickly, and he'd be interested in her for that alone, but there is something more, something else. It is like-
It is like a forest, quiet in the moments before a storm. It is like the water pulling away from the beach before returning back in a devastating wave; like the eye of a raging tempest. She stands on the precipice of something far larger than herself, and he doesn't think she even knows it. He, meanwhile, watches her from within that inevitable destruction.
He would very much like to see her again. The thought eats him alive.
For now, though, he heads for the final meteorite. It is large, and strange, and luminous, and he cannot help but lay his hand upon it. It calls to him nearly as much as she does. As he falls unconscious, he swears he can hear the sound of someone's happy laughter in the distant corners of his mind.
~
To die, he'd once heard, is to sleep; and the afterlife is just a long dream. If that's the case, hell is a remarkably cold nightmare.
The bodies of the other dreamers lie collapsed in the snow, their numbers fewer and fewer as he ascends the mountain the meteorites have conjured. He, being both tenacious and a God's creation, does not succumb to their pitiful human exhaustion.
There aren't many snowy mountains like this anymore – needless to say, he has not summitted one. He does not know what he expects to see at the top, but it is certainly not
~
He wakes up. He's on a beach he doesn't recognize. He was here a few minutes, a lifetime, ago. He knows, intimately, that all of reality is a farce.
The traveler and the girl are there. He wishes they weren't, wishes he had another moment to compose himself. He doesn't want to be seen like this, doesn't want her to see him like this. But, they're here, and he has the perfect ammunition against them.
"The stars, the sky… it's all a gigantic hoax. A lie."
The girl, evidently an astrologist, yells at him. He thinks he deserves it, but he also is obliged to admit that he's not giving this conversation nearly as much of his attention as it deserves. He keeps finding himself drawn to her features, her mannerisms, rather than the exact meaning of her words.
There is definitely something great and terrible about her; something strange but not necessarily uncouth. Seeing her again is not enough; no one-sided group conversation will ever be enough. He wants to understand her completely; to be like a watchmaker picking apart a timepiece with the utmost care as to discover what trick lets it tick so silently.
He makes an excuse to leave by summoning his soldiers, but finds himself only retreating to the top of a nearby cliff. Hidden, he watches as the astrologist moves with a supernatural grace and systematically downs all her enemies.
"Wow Mona, you did great!" Shouts the traveler's strange companion. "But oh no- did you get hurt?"
Sure enough, Mona- for evidently that is her name- looks down at her arm. A long scratch from an agent's knife runs down her forearm. She laughs it off, dismissing it as superficial. From what he can see, she's right- it's nothing deep, and should fully heal within the course of a week.
He looks down. The five hundred years of his existence taper to a palpitating point, and vanish.
On his arm lies a silver mirror of her wound.
He gets it, now- the second hand moves so quickly the sound melts unnoticeably into the background; but even when knowing the once-hidden truth there is no less joy to be found in the whole.
He has a choice to make. He should turn away, run and never look back, but in the empty place inside him where his heart should be, he feels that his choice has already been made.
He gets up, turns, and walks away. He can still hear the distant echoes of her voice for what feels like a very long time. He understands, now, the allure of a siren's song.