Archive of Our Own

“Where—?”

Gold light dazzles Childe when his heavy eyelids blink open. For a moment, he sees nothing but glittering dust, a shimmering haze of light and fire. It coalesces into the shapes of Zhongli’s residence: painted pine screens and red candle lanterns and the window that looks onto a quiet garden courtyard.

Home, Childe thinks.

Then the memories rush back like a knife to the gut.

The Golden House, the Northland Bank, the stage on which he played the fool. Dance, Tartaglia, dance. Like a puppet on his Archon’s strings, Childe had stuttered through his steps. But which Archon had it been who held them?

In the wake of a brutal battle, Childe had nearly drowned the harbour city.

In the wake of a revelation, Childe had nearly drowned.

Useless boy, foolish boy, weak and insufficient. The Abyss hisses a mad mantra and drags its claws through the dregs of Childe’s mind. A festering abscess, the darkness beckons him back below by a tether. He’s strung up by tethers: the Abyss, the Tsaritsa, Zhongli, his own solipsistic wanting. Drawn and quartered.

The contract is fulfilled. That which you seek is now bestowed unto you, for my promise is solid as stone.

How dispassionate Zhongli had sounded as he handed over his god-heart right before Childe’s eyes. All along, a mere transaction fated to conclude beneath the coffered ceilings of that cathedral of capital, the monument to the Fatui’s worldly power. Childe had been nothing but a piece in a divine game he could never have hoped to win. How could he? He hadn’t even known he was playing.

No, not playing. He was being played.

Now, Zhongli kneels beside the large tub with his shirtsleeves folded neatly above his elbows. His face is impassive, stone-carved and beautiful. There’s no cinnabar red around his eyes today, no careful tie to bind his hair. He doesn’t look like a god. He doesn’t even look like the fastidious funeral consultant. He just looks like Zhongli.

But Zhongli isn’t Zhongli. Zhongli is Morax. Zhongli is Rex Lapis. Zhongli is a liar a liar a liarliarliar.

“You—!”

Childe makes to lunge at that beautiful liar’s face. Oh, how he wants to tear at it with his claws until that pristine flesh runs red with ribbons of emotion! Ocean eyes go incandescent, but Childe barely manages to surge an inch out of the water before pain lances through his side. Outward and outward, it spreads from his ribs in unending echoes of hurt, as though he’s a single agonized nerve.

A scream chokes in his throat and he falls—

falls,

falls,

—Zhongli catches Childe before he slips below the water’s edge. Gently, he settles the ruin of Childe’s body against the slope of the tub, mindful of the bruises that blotch his back.

“Careful,” he murmurs, and that bedrock baritone is softened with so much pity that Childe wants to retch. It’s in his eyes, too, that pity. His amber irises swim in it. “You have been gravely hurt.”

Ha! How plainly Zhongli phrases it. How plainly he carves his words in the passive voice. Watch how he absolves himself with all the pride of a god! You have been hurt. You have been hurt. You have been… Haha! For a certainty, the Foul Legacy had torn Tartaglia’ body apart, but that isn’t where Childe hurts.

Who do you think hurt me? he wants to ask, accuse, attack.

Instead, Childe throws his head back and laughs. Madly, he laughs and laughs and laughs. It’s a mirthless sound, a high, insensate shriek. Spittle flies from his lips and flecks his chin. Childe laughs until his throat goes hoarse, and then he laughs and laughs some more.

Zhongli listens. Like the immovable earth, he waits for Childe to tire himself out.

After a last humourless exhale, Childe’s naked arm descends with a splash. Droplets dash over the edge of the tub, blotting the bamboo mat. Around Childe’s battered body, the water swirls pink. Herbs float upon the displaced surface: jasmine, qingxin, violetgrass. Healing water. Is this what Zhongli thinks will help him? A paltry bath?

“Childe—” Zhongli’s voice breaks on the middle of his name. Ungloved hands hover in the air, their palms facing up and delicately tapered fingers spread wide. The ripples in the bath may as well be a raging tide between them. “May I wash your wounds?”

Childe’s eyes close. He recalls the first time Zhongli had asked to touch him, late one balmy evening as they strolled across Liuli Pavilion. Their mouths had been so warm that night. Warm from Jueyun chilis, warm from baijiu, warm from the press of each other’s lips. Over and over, they had kissed while moonrise painted Yujing Terrace silver. Sweet kisses, slow kisses, dark kisses laced with yearning. Childe had fallen, then. He had fallen again—into Zhongli’s arms, into his bed.

He thinks of all the touches since, all those lying lover’s touches. If Childe keeps his eyes shut, perhaps he can hold back the hot flood of traitorous tears.

“Childe,” Zhongli whispers again. “Let me tend to your injuries.”

“Why even ask?” Childe snaps. “You do whatever you want, anyway,”

Emotion parades beneath the valence of inky lashes: hurt, guilt, pride. Zhongli lets none of it inflect his voice. “That is not… Tartaglia, please.”

From annihilation comes apathy. Childe slumps in the bath. “Fine. Whatever.”

The hands that land on him are familiar, but their hesitation is not. Gingerly, Zhongli scrubs the sweat and blood from Childe’s copper curls, massaging the tension from his scalp, his neck, his shoulders, slowly sloughing off the grime. He works as though any sudden movement might send Childe into another mad paroxysm, keeping every touch gentle—so cruelly gentle, so devastatingly tender. Childe wishes Zhongli would knead against his aching flesh, would push and press and reveal his brutality once more. The pain would be a greater kindness than this, Childe thinks. But no. Zhongli delicately lathers astringent soap over the lightning figures that sprawl across Childe’s mangled skin. He assiduously digs the hardened viscera out from beneath his nails. He so carefully cups a palm over Childe’s brow to shield his face from the runoff and rinses Childe’s hair with trickles of fresh water.

Childe doesn’t move. He barely even breathes. Around him, the water turns redder still.

Through the bitterness of the herbs and the stale stench of ozone, Childe can smell Zhongli: sandalwood and star anise and something mineral that he now understands to be his divinity.

When the bath goes cold, Zhongli draws Childe up with a liquid sluice and wraps him in a willowy robe. Only then does Childe blink open his eyes, staring at the tub with blank indifference. Numbly, he watches the ripples settle. The surface goes smooth under the blanched sprigs and a film of filth.

Dross, Childe thinks. Impurities skimmed off and left behind. The detritus of precious metals. All that’s left is dross.

Childe sleeps for three days. His frenzied mind is plagued by writhing shadows and mocking masks. Fragments of feeling pierce thought the delirium: a tangle of sheets, a drench of sweat, a porcelain cup held up to chapped lips. Over and over, he falls and falls, imagining the honeyed warmth of amber eyes.

Finally, the fever breaks. Lucidity brings with it a great and terrible agony. Pain shrieks its way through Childe’s shattered bones, a rending ache that blurs his vision when he pushes himself upright. But Childe clings to the pain. The pain is real. People lie, but the pain is honest. He grits his teeth and takes in his surroundings.

It’s Zhongli’s room. Zhongli’s bed. The twisted sheets are damp and stained with fever-sweat. Through the open window, a warm wind carries in the fresh pine scent of the courtyard garden. Childe can hear the fountain trickle. Even at this distance, the water of it helps settle him.

The very first time that Childe had woken in this bed, it had been under a golden sunstream and the grounding weight of Zhongli’s arm around his waist. Dust motes had sparkled above them like a canopy of daystars, shining in Zhongli’s open amber eyes.

“Were you watching me sleep?” Childe had teased.

Zhongli had only smiled. He had smiled at Childe and he had pressed a kiss to his nose and he had rolled them through the sheets. They had spent that day in bed—laughing, loving, lying.

In the cruel and honest present, the bed is empty and Childe’s stomach roars. On protesting limbs, he manages to stand, though he has to brace himself against the wall and wait out a terrible dizziness. Bile rises in his throat when he catches sight of his own skin, every inch blotched blue and purple from the monster that had shattered him. Useless boy, foolish boy, weak and insufficient.

A robe lies folded over the back of an armchair. Childe slips it over his shoulders and draws it closed to hide from his own eyes. He follows the rich waft of food into the kitchen.

Dish upon dish weighs down the table, a banquet of flavours he had gradually come to recognize and appreciate during his time in Liyue. There’s an excessive array of morning meals outspread before him: hot noodles topped with chili sauce and garlic chives; pan-fried jiaozi filled with pork and vegetables; steaming stacks of jian bing—the stuffed envelopes of wheat and grain that remind him of the blintzes his mother used to prepare when he was a boy. And then there are bowls of congee, smooth boiled rice ready to be topped by a myriad of marinated meats and fragrant garnishes, or else dipped into with lightly-salted youtiao, fried dough ready to be torn lengthwise in two.

“Like fine wine, every meal pairs with a memory,” Zhongli once said. Standing at the threshold of the kitchen, Childe nearly loses himself to the tides of reminiscence: fileted whitefish flaking to gold-flecked eyes; silken tofu spooned up into an almost-kiss; seared meats draped in sweet red chilis, savoured and savoured—until at last they had ended in bed with bitten lips and fire heating their veins.

Now, the thought of those meals only brings ash to the back of Childe’s mouth.

Zhongli is fussing over the stove, dressed in solemn black robes that spill from his shoulders like a silken shadow, graceful beneath the fall of his rich brown hair. He turns when he hears the slow drag of footsteps.

“Ah, Childe. I had not expected you to wake so soon.” He gestures to the spread of food. “I would have brought this to you in bed.”

“Why?” asks Childe.

The tiniest frown mars Zhongli’s seamless brow. “It’s been days since you had something to eat,” he answers plainly. “You must be hungry.”

It’s not what Childe was asking, but his voice has dissolved somewhere in his throat. His nails dig deep grooves into his palm.

Zhongli clears his throat. For perhaps the first time, he looks uncertain, awkward in the way he handles the elegant lines of his own body. “Would you prefer to eat alone?”

Childe’s head snaps down in a harsh nod.

“Very well, then.”

Zhongli collects his tea from the counter and steps forward. His cupped palm rises as though about to caress Childe’s cheek, but he seems to think better of it. “I’ll be in the study, if you need me,” he says. Deftly, he steps around Childe and patters down the hall.

Childe stumbles to the table with a scowl. He feels out of breath from standing, and his weakness revolts him, this prison of his broken bones, this gnawing hunger that claws at his hollow stomach. The Foul Legacy’s malignance still stirs in his marrow, malicious and grotesque. It amplifies the furies in his mind.

Useless boy, foolish boy, weak and insufficient.

There’s a fork on the table, comically out of place among the staples of a Liyuean breakfast. Childe despises the fork’s existence. He loathes its strange unbelongingness in this strange cruel city with its lying liar god.

“I don’t need you,” he says out loud to the fork. The smooth silver mocks him with a cold touch against the scars on his palm. If Childe had his strength, he could crush the metal in his fist, peel every tine apart and run it through the table.

Yet the fork feeds him. With the fork, Childe eats. He eats some of everything until he worries he’ll be sick from it, but still, still, he hungers. So he eats and he eats and he eats some more.

Childe eats while Zhongli lingers in the air. Even beneath the aroma of braised meats and coriander seeds, Childe can still smell him: sandalwood and star anise and the apricot sweetness of his osmanthus tea.

“I don’t need you. I don’t need you. I don’t need you.”

The fork laughs against the bowl while Childe eats.

Inhale, exhale. Ebb, flow. Two become one become two.

In the small, symmetrical courtyard, Childe moves through basic forms. His rusted greatbow is too heavy to lift but the water’s flow remains at his fingertips, soothing against his seared palms. A healing element, he had once been told. It made him laugh then and it makes him laugh now: the thought of his bloodstained hands holding something so pure.

From its zenith in the clear blue sky, the sun beams down, coaxing the freckles out from Childe’s cheeks. Leaves susurrate, the red-gold rustle of autumnal foliage slipping in between abyssal hisses. The gurgles rising from the mossy fountain drown out the noise of Childe’s panting breaths.

Inhale, exhale.

Stance change: legs shoulder-width apart, weight anchored on his heels, thighs trembling. Call forth pure water. Twin daggers gleam like crystal in the clench of his fists, blades rippling in the sunlight.

Inhale, exhale.

First strike: right slash forward in a downward curve. Second strike: its sinistral counterpart, crossing to the left. Third strike: drive both daggers down. Momentum carries Childe forward. Agony gnaws tartly at his ribs, but he pushes through.

Inhale, exhale.

Fourth strike: upright, light on his feet. Two become one. Fifth strike: the lance lunges, drawing the lines of his body in. Sixth strike: thrust and sever. Pain sears along his back—persist! One becomes two. His beloved daggers are back in his palms, dissolving into mist.

Childe trembles from exertion. His movements, honed through years of victories, are rough and choppy with pain. Like the broken waves that crash against the black beaches of Morepesok, he stutters through each stance. The loose-fitting brown shirt and roughspun trousers he had found tucked away in one of Zhongli’s drawers, stick to his skin with sweat. The salt-sting of it reminds him of his frailty.

Childe had wanted to leave. He had told Zhongli he would leave, but Zhongli asked where he would go and Childe had no answer.

“Stay,” Zhongli had said in that infuriatingly impassive tone. “Until you know.”

For some reason, Childe had stayed—still stays.

He stays, but he can’t stay still. In Snezhnaya, staying still means a slow death in the snow. So he stands in the courtyard and he trains. He struggles through his forms, feet slipping on the flagstones, gritting his teeth against the agony of the ebb and flow. He screams into the leaf-rustle when the bruising rattles his bones. He trains and he trains until his muscles collapse and the garden goes colorless under the pale light of the moon.

Inhale, exhale.

The next day, he trains again.

“What are you doing out here in the rain?”

Childe can barely make out Zhongli’s words over the pounding drumbeat of the downpour, droplets pelting the flagstones in staccato rhythm. Streaks of lightning lick bright lines across a sky so dark that even at midday it seems like night has stolen over the courtyard.

Storms are rare in Liyue Harbor, but the torrential rains fall as though they have a point to prove.

The last time Liyue had seen a storm like this… the last time…

The sky weeps. Rain falls so fiercely that it blurs the courtyard into a mirage of wood and stone. Zhongli’s hazy silhouette stands beneath the roof’s jutting eaves as though he had been carved there.

“Training.” It’s the first word Childe has spoken in days—maybe weeks. The syllables ring strange to his own ears, dampened by the rain’s cascade. Childe settles into his stance.

Inhale, exhale.

Humidity chokes him like a miasma, coating the insides of his lungs. Liyue and its stifling humidity! Liyue and its stifling, smothering stones! The clammy air expands through Childe’s chest and tries to drown him, but Childe knows water and water is better than the burning ash of dust.

“Your wounds have not yet healed and your objective is long over,” Zhongli says, resolute through the battering shower. “There is no need for this.”

No. No, there is every need. What could a god know of such a need? What could a god know of the fleshy frailty of a Childe’s body. What could he possibly know? Useless boy, foolish boy, weak and insufficient. He needs to get stronger. The Abyss is a constant reminder, the tether tugging him by the string of his spine.

Childe ignores Zhongli. Ebb, flow. His daggers move formlessly, water through water, their shapes shifting beneath his palms. Two become one. He’s drawn through the motions, momentum puppeteering him through each strike.

A thunderclap trembles through the harbor valley. Childe’s jaw rattles from the force of it, teeth grinding together.

Zhongli draws nearer. Within seconds of standing in the courtyard proper, his clothes are bloated by rain. His silken hair steeps to black, their tips darkened to a rich ochre. The flyaway strands that frame his face stick to his cheeks like running ink.

“Perhaps, it is time that we talk. I have been patient with you so far, but it may well be—”

Childe pivots. Fury flashes in the washed-out gray of his eyes, their cerulean tint having been leeched out by the storm. Dead and deadly eyes. He laughs without humour. “No, Zhongli, Morax, whoever you are. No, we’re done talking.”

“Childe, we—”

Another violet-edged crack of lightning rends the sky and Childe lunges across the courtyard. His sea storm dagger kisses Zhongli’s throat, the glassy edge beckoning a single drop of blood from the column of his neck. Ebb, flow, blood from a stone.

“I said we’re done talking,” Childe hisses. Spittle flies from his lips, which curve in a deranged and dangerous smile. “All you do is lie.”

Zhongli evades Childe’s hold. A pink rivulet scurries below his collar. “What would you have me do if not talk?”

“Fight me!” Childe’s teeth bare in a vicious snarl. There is only one way to reconciliation. He strikes again, both daggers coming down in the space Zhongli stood a second ago.

“No, I will not fight you, Childe.” Zhongli keeps his hands clasped behind his back, the picture of imperviousness. Such divine arrogance!

“Why not?” Again he lunges. Again Zhongli dodges the strike without effort. “Why won’t you fight me?”

“I have spent far too many years fighting. Even a stone may tire.”

Rain runs down his face in a steady mockery of Childe’s tears. Childe wants Zhongli’s tears. He wants his rage and his sorrow—anything but this poised, impassive pity.

Childe is about to run Zhongli’s false heart through with the point of his lance when pain sears through his side. At once: obliteration. It sends him to his knees and then he falls—

falls,

falls,

—onto the ground, sinking into the creeping mud, the endless dark, sticky like the sludge of the Abyss.

Rain washes away his blades and Childe’s vision smears to black.

Hours later, Childe wakes in Zhongli’s bed, dry and bandaged. Rain patters softly outside the window, the tempest quelled to a light drizzle. Beneath the residual reek of ozone, Childe catches the metallic bite of iron and he looks down at himself as though he exists somehow apart. He stares at the rust-tinted splotch that sprawls out from the patch of gauze over his ribs, a decaying flower blooming over his too-weak flesh. In his one-sided spar, Childe had managed to tear open an old wound.

A pot of tea sits on the nightstand. Despite the tremors in his arms, Childe manages to pour a cup without spilling, and he cradles it between his palms, seeking the last vestiges of warmth that linger in the golden brew. It soothes his throat and settles the ache in his belly.

Eventually, the storm wears itself out and the days drag on.

A cold snap cracks its palm across Liyue Harbor. Childe wakes the morning all the ginkgo leaves fall to find a shower of gold outside the window, dappling the sunlight’s stream. For the first time in weeks, the shadows on his skin come from light, not bruises.

Outside, bright leaves twirl merrily to the ground like gilded snowflakes. They fill the quiet courtyard with papery piles, a golden carpet that shifts and breathes with the zephyr breeze. Inhale, exhale. The sight reminds Childe of the mounds of mora coins that clinked beneath his feet under the opulent dome of the Golden House.

Zhongli sits on the worn stone bench before the fountain, staring thoughtfully up at the trees. At the sharp leaf crunch, he turns to Childe. “Forgive my intrusion,” he says. There’s a faraway look in his eyes, but he blinks once and those amber pools go clear. “I did not intend to impose upon your routine. I merely wanted to watch the leaves fall.”

He speaks as though this weren’t his own courtyard in his own home. Childe almost laughs at the absurdity of the misplaced politeness.

“It’s fine,” Childe answers. It wouldn’t be the first time Zhongli had watched him train.

Inhale, exhale. His warm breath hangs like pale smoke in the cold air before him. Stance change: legs shoulder-width apart, weight anchored on his heels. Ebb, flow. Mist gathers around his fingertips, threatening to condense into liquid knives. The idea of his beloved blades licks at his palms.

He’s distracted by the tumbling tide of gold. Leaves and leaves and yet more leaves swirl and spiral down on the breeze. They gentle over his shoulders and catch in the copper of his hair.

Childe lets the water go. Gingerly, he perches on the bench beside Zhongli. The slab of granite is small enough that if he were to spread his legs their knees would touch. Even living under the same roof, this is the closest they’ve been since the day of the storm. Zhongli has given Childe so much space it became a gulf.

“Why do all the leaves fall at once?”

Zhongli surveys Childe with equanimity. If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. “The ginkgo is a decisive tree,” he says evenly. His lips twitch with unspoken amusement. “Some may contend that it is a bit rash, but the result is rather lovely, wouldn’t you say?”

Zhongli collects a fallen leaf from the stone between them and holds it out in his palm. Goldenrod meets dark leather; it stands out strikingly.

“Deciduous trees lose their leaves as a result of how their petioles—that is, their stems—seek to protect the tree. As the weather turns colder, petioles develop scars to help resist disease. Most flowering trees form scars in different places over a period of several months, and so their leaves fall gradually. However, when it comes to the percipient ginkgo, all the petioles form their scars at once. When the hard frost arrives, the tree is prepared, and every leaf severs in a magnificent cascade of gold.”

Scars and gold and that wistful smile on Zhongli’s lips. Childe is struck by the sudden realization that he has missed this. He has missed the captivating cadence of Zhongli’s speech. He has missed Zhongli’s peerless ability to wax lyrical about something as mundane as a tree, spinning dross into gold.

Oh, Zhongli.

There’s an ache in Childe’s chest, raw and searing.

A gust of wind catches the silken strands of Zhongli’s unbound hair, fanning them around his head like phrases drawn out in liquid ink. His black tassel earing sways. Over his graceful features, the goldleaf rain casts shimmering, scale-like patterns. Childe’s eyes trace the lines of his chiseled cheekbones, his soft storytelling lips, the thick swoop of dark lashes.

In the warped ripples of his rage, Childe had forgotten this, too. He had forgotten how beautiful Zhongli is.

Zhongli catches him staring. Childe’s cheeks heat with embarrassment, but he refuses to look away. Defiant now, he only glares more openly at that beautiful, impassive face.

You look away first, he dares.

But Zhongli never looks away.

His eyes hold Childe hostage and Childe feels himself sinking into the honeyed warmth of them. How long has it been since he’s looked—really looked—into those eyes? He feels caught by them, imprisoned, a dragonfly in amber. The courtyard goes hazy and distant around the brilliant richness of those golden irises, those strange, dazzling pupils.

In the end, it’s Childe who looks away, cowed by the magnitude of his own yearning, the churn of it beneath the constant foam of his fury. He clears his throat.

“How long will it last?”

Slowly, Zhongli blinks. “Hmm?”

Childe stretches out his arm, sweeping it through the leaf-filled air. Papery fans cling to the roughspun fabric of his simple shirt. “How long will it take the rest of the leaves to fall?”

“Oh.” Zhongli’s brows knit together in a frown and Childe feels a petty victory at the tiny glimpse of feeling. In the weeks since Childe has been convalescing, Zhongli has barely shown a scrap of emotion. Sedate, in all things, his features carved from stone. Before long, the placid expression returns. “Several hours, give or take.”

“That’s it?!”

“There’s great beauty to be found in the ephemeral, Childe. It invites a deeper appreciation.”

“Hmph.” Childe cranes his neck up to better see the trees. Already, their branches are more than half bare. It will be over soon. Idly, he reaches up, blotting out the sunrise with his hand.

Something tickles his palm and Childe closes his fingers around his unwitting prize. He lowers his arm, holding his fist between himself and Zhongli. One by one, his fingers open like flower petals, revealing a bright gold ginkgo leaf, deeply grooved along the middle.

“How auspicious,” Zhongli murmurs. He trails a single slender a finger over the foliage’s striated veins, and Childe grows intensely aware that, for the first time in weeks, the only thing between them is a single leaf and the supple stitching of Zhongli’s glove. “Tradition holds that, if one catches a ginkgo leaf as it falls, they will enjoy good fortune.”

Ha!

“I think it’s a little late for that,” Childe says acrimoniously.

Zhongli makes a small, displeased sound and retracts his finger. Silence stretches outward, unbearable in its abruptness. It makes Childe feel restless and regretful. He shifts on the stone seat and longs to fall back under the spell of Zhongli’s words. Oh, but there’s a gulf between them, a churning sea, and the Abyss’s cloying hiss curls around his nape like a collar. Useless boy, foolish boy, weak and insufficient.

Breathing out a shuddering sigh, Childe musters his courage and holds the leaf out by its long petiole: an offering. “Tell me about the leaves?” he entreats. “I’ve never seen leaves shaped like these.”

Their fingers brush when Zhongli accepts the golden fan. He watches Childe for a moment, his face as inscrutable as ever. “Ginkgo leaves are indeed rare among seed plants for their distinctive fan shapes,” he explains. “Although they are often likened to the maidenhair fern, one of the ginkgo tree’s most striking features is the deep saffron hue the green leaves take on in autumn.

“See this notch here?” Zhongli points to the deep grove that forks through the fan. “Most leaves are divided into two lobes along the centre: distinct yet attached.” He chuckles softly. “As you can imagine, this has made them quite the subject of metaphor and poetry.”

“Would you share a poem?”

Zhongli appears caught out by the request. Perhaps even a little shy, if the pink tint upon his cheekbones isn’t merely the chapping from the chilly wind. Tapping the fingers of his empty hand against his thigh, he hums thoughtfully, momentarily contemplative. His voice takes on a different timbre when he recites:

“Is it one living being that divides itself? Or do two choose each other so that they are known as one?” The leaf blurs to a swirl of gold as Zhongli rolls the topaz stem between his thumb and index. “To answer such questions, I have found one sense that’s true: don’t you feel from my song that I am one and also two?”

Two as one. One as two. Childe looks between Zhongli and the leaf. Gold and yet more gold. “Is that another Liyue poet?”

“A bard from Mondstadt, actually.” That wistful look lands upon Zhongli’s face once more, the shadow of a smile. Then his eyes rise to Childe’s. “Ah, but I forget myself. Forgive my idle reminiscence.”

This time, the silence is, if not comfortable, then at least tolerable, filled by the whisper of falling leaves. Outward, it stretches and stretches until the thought of conversation recedes beyond the trees. There is so much to say, but something about this morning feels too precious to ruin.

The magic lasts another hour. Then the leaves conclude their descent and Childe returns inside.

Time passes.

They watch the sunrise. They drink tea. They talk about things that don’t matter.

Winter arrives and cold winds curl their claws through the harbor. This close to the sea, Liyue’s gentle climate lacks the whiteout haze of a Snezhnayan snowfall, but the bitter air brings Childe some small comfort. Early evenings pour into quiet nights, and soon the days begin to lengthen, shadowed by the brush-stroke boughs of naked trees.

Sun rises on citrus season. From the mountain orchards, the laborers descend with their prized harvests: plump and juicy fruits dressed in all the colors of a radiant dawn. Glossy persimmons with their honey-sweetness and their jelly flesh, so ripe and soft their pulp liquifies to crimson nectar. Mandarins with pebbled skin and loose gold peels, each orange segment bursting with tangy flavour. The heavy storms had made for a bountiful yield, and Childe entertains the foolish thought that the vortex hadn’t been for nothing after all. The fruits, at least, had reveled in the rains.

Inhale, exhale.

The courtyard is quiet without its leaf rustle. It makes the water at Childe’s fingertips seem so loud, gurgling like a brook, a stream, a river between his palms. Ebb, flow. He moves fluidly through his forms, his body reforged. Scarred but made stronger by time.

(Strange how it’s in the dead of winter that Childe finally begins to feel alive.)

Zhongli is at the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor overseeing a service for a relative of the Qixing. Childe is seized by the urge to brew a pot of tea.

But tea begs a tea pot and the tea pots are in Zhongli’s study.

Childe hasn’t entered that room since before the ruin of his body had been collected from the Golden House. Zhongli had given Childe full reign over his modest home, but Childe could never bring himself to cross that threshold into the hermitage where Zhongli spends his quiet days and his long, unsleeping nights.

After a long bath, Childe wanders in.

He is struck, immediately, by the way it brims with things: porcelain vases and ancient artifacts, and stacks of books and scrolls. Memories beckon in the form of a paper fan, a set of chopsticks, an azure cup. Evidence of the time that they had spent in each other’s company, preserved with all the care of a meticulous collector, displayed with all the reverence of a man who worries he might one day forget.

Flustered, Childe turns to the shelf of teapots.

Once, on a golden summer morning, Childe had offered to clean up after breakfast. His sudsy hands had groped for the teapot before Zhongli appeared at his elbow, expression aghast as he stole it right from Childe’s palms.

“Zhongli!” Childe had pouted, impatient to be done with mundane chores. “Let me finish washing the dishes!”

The horror on Zhongli’s face had softened to a generous laugh. “You have never seen a zisha teapot, then? You do not wash these, Childe.”

In that verbose, captivating way of his, he had woven the history of purple sand clay, mined from the mountains to Liyue’s north. How one of Rex Lapis’s followers had crafted the first zisha teapot with exceptional artistry, carving and shaping the vessel over several weeks much as Rex Lapis had shaped the land, diligent and unassuming. How the unglazed porous clay—a mix of kaolin, quartz, and mica—absorbs the natural oils of the tea over time, learning, drinking, indelibly altering.

“This accumulation gives each teapot a unique character that colors every future brewing,” Zhongli had concluded solemnly. “It is the summation of memories, a record of every leaf and stone.”

Carefully drying Childe’s hands, Zhongli had drawn him back to the table and brewed another pot of Da Hong Pao. He steeped the dark leaves for a long, quiet minute, during which Childe had noisily shuffled and fidgeted in his seat.

“Every journey has its destination, Childe.” Tea poured out in bright orange eddies. Zhongli held out a cup in offering. “Keep still. Don’t rush.”

Childe had sipped the tea the way he had often watched Zhongli sip his tea: slowly, with his eyes closed and his lips parted as if about to sigh (as if about to kiss). The robust flavour burst forth on his tongue—sweet and woodsy with floral muscatel tones.

“What do you taste?”

Childe held his eyes closed and took another thoughtful sip. “Flowers… orchid, maybe? Woodsmoke. Uh… something a little like… rocks?”

He felt a little foolish saying it, but, when he blinked up at Zhongli, an expression of profound contentment had carved itself upon his features. “Very good,” he had said, and something in Childe’s chest clenched at the praise. “Very good indeed. Without rocks, there is no tea.”

When Zhongli poured more hot water for a second steeping, Childe kept very still.

It is this same teapot—this zisha teapot dedicated to Da Hong Pao, this summation of memories, this record of every leaf and stone—that Childe now collects from the shelf.

Inhale, exhale.

Fear and fury and fondness: Zhongli had steeped his way under Childe’s skin.

Inhale, exhale.

Childe brews the tea.

Zhongli returns from the quiet funeral ceremony to find Childe sitting at the pinewood table with a purple clay teapot and the lingering aroma sweet orchids in the air.

“I’m ready to talk,” Childe says. Before him, his hands tremble, blunt nails scratching at the woodgrain. He wears a belligerent look on his face, the expression every bit as much of a mask as the crimson faceplate he hasn’t donned in months.

Zhongli refills the pot with hot water and takes a seat. Like Childe had, he too recalls the pot of Da Hong Pao they had shared, the way Childe’s restless shuffling had, for a moment, been quelled into something contemplative.

But he also recalls a far more distant memory, one of curving his palms around the mountains of Qiaoying Village, kneading the mineral-rich hills to establish the terroir from which would bloom the flowers of Liyue’s Four Great Teas. Oxidated rock teas, rich oolongs twisted into strips and heavily fired, smoky with notes of stone fruit. Beneath the soothing scent of florals lurks the bittersweet tang of nostalgia.

A moment passes, and Zhongli pours a golden ribbon of tea into each of their cups. Unmoving, they watch the surfaces settle, rich ochre stilling to gilded mirrors.

“When we met…” Childe begins slowly, tasting his words while Zhongli savours the flavours of the well-steeped tea, the summation of centuries. “Did you already know who I was?”

“Yes.” Zhongli sets his cup down and laces his long fingers together. “The Tsaritsa first wrote to inform me of the role you would play when we arranged our contract. I gleaned a little more from the Regrator’s agents at the Northland Bank. No matter how handsomely one pays their employees, the right circumstances can always inspire some indiscretion.”

Childe’s mouth flattens into a hard line. “So, it was a lie from the very beginning, then.”

“That is not what I said.”

The tendons of Childe’s hands flex. How quickly the still waters begin to churn. “That first night, were you Morax or were you Zhongli?”

“Does it matter?” Zhongli asks evenly. “You are Childe just as you are Tartaglia.” He speaks both names with equal reverence: the airy exhale of Childe; the accented glissando of Tar-ta-li-ah.

“That isn’t—that’s not the same.”

Zhongli’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Is it not? Humour me for an instant: what would you say if I were to pose the same question in reverse? When you sought out a humble funeral consultant, were you Childe then? Or were you Tartaglia, the Eleventh Harbinger sent to Liyue to claim Rex Lapis’s heart?”

Childe’s cheeks burn. He feels too warm in this stifling room with its flickering candle lanterns and its snowless air. He feels too warm when Zhongli reaches out and takes one of his hands in his own.

“What is it that you seek in a name, Childe?” Zhongli kisses his hand. When it doesn’t retreat, he kisses each finger, mouthing over the rough knuckles in turn, licking over the veined webbing between them. His lips trace the fractal lines that sprawl across Childe’s palm, the lightning figures forever imprinted upon his skin—the price of a mad delusion. “Who is it you are searching for?”

Childe ignores the question. Emotion ripples over his features. He barrels on.

“You lied to me.”

“I did.”

“You used me.”

“I did.”

“You never even gave me a choice!”

There it is: the crack, the fissure. Childe’s voice breaks on his words and an ocean drowns his eyes. When he tears his hand back, it trembles in a fist against his side.

Like this, Zhongli understands how Childe had earned his moniker. The man is incomprehensibly ever in the eye of the storm, acting as if battle exists for his sake alone. But beneath his easy confidence is something raw and tender. Yes, Tartaglia may be the Vanguard of the Tsaritsa’s celestial war, but it is Childe who sits at his table, a young man who feels too much, a boy whose choices were taken from him the day that he had fallen.

“I know,” Zhongli says. “I did not give you a choice.”

There was a time Rex Lapis would have offered excuses and explanations, intricately crafted justifications designed to absolve himself of blame. Such was the pride of the divine. But Zhongli knows he can only live with his mistakes as he has lived with them for weeks.

“Childe, I am sorry.”

Childe lunges. The teapot tumbles to the floor in a shatter of clay and a trickle of tea, but neither pays it any mind. Scarred fingers close around a handful of silken hair and then Childe crushes his mouth to Zhongli’s.

It’s as much a kiss as a fight, another one-sided rematch of teeth and tongue. Violent and vicious, Childe bites at Zhongli’s lips until the blood smears between their mouths, drowning the floral flavour of their tea. Ebb, flow, blood from a stone. He licks over Zhongli’s teeth and gums, smearing red all over.

And Zhongli lets him.

Zhongli opens to the intensity of Childe’s kiss. A low growl rumbles through his chest, but he keeps still, drinking Childe in, consuming the searing desperation that lurks in the harsh collision of their mouths.

Around them swirls the smoky orchid fragrance of spilled tea. The boundless night sprawls beyond the window, flecked with the fire of a thousand stars.

Childe releases Zhongli’s hair. When he pulls back, his eyes are dark and hungry. Blood smears across his lips and chin, a bright and honest vermillion.

“Come with me,” Childe growls. “Come to bed with me.”

Childe ends up naked, sitting on the bed with his legs hanging off the edge and a shirtless Zhongli kneeling on the ground between them.

“Isn’t this backwards, Morax?” There’s a mocking edge to Childe’s tone. Rage roars through his veins, but it wars now with the force of his want. He wrenches Zhongli’s head closer with a fistful of dark hair. “Since when do gods get on their knees?”

Unbothered, Zhongli presses warm, tender kisses to the gruesome patchwork of scars that prowl over Childe’s inner thighs. The ruin of his skin is so deep that Childe barely feels it, but he sees the wet drag of Zhongli’s mouth and the seeing is almost enough to evoke sensation.

“This isn’t the first time I have knelt before you,” Zhongli says with a touch of amusement. Over Childe’s thigh, his smiling lips trail higher until he hears a hitch of breath. “From my vantage point, this remains the same.”

His vantage point: bowed between Childe’s legs, blinking up from dark lashes as though he were the supplicant and Childe were the one seated upon a throne of stone.

“Don’t—” Childe falters. His fingers clench, one hand fisting in the sheets beside him, the other scratching at Zhongli’s scalp. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, Childe?” The warmth of Zhongli’s exhale curls around the base of his hardening cock. Gently, he mouths at Childe’s balls, licking over the seam of them until Childe groans. “How else should I look at you?”

Again, Childe’s face flushes. “N-not like this.” He scowls, less at Zhongli than his own weakness. “Not like I’m something—”

“Precious?” Zhongli feathers a reverent line of open-mouthed kisses over his pelvis. “Treasured?” He trails his lips over Childe’s shaft, wetting his skin with the hint of a tongue. “Adored?” His mouth rounds over the head of his cock and Childe’s hips jolt at the sudden heat.

“I nearly drowned your city!” Childe shouts. It’s too much. He feels too much. Zhongli’s mouth is hot and wet and tight around his cock and it’s all suddenly too much. “I would have cut out your heart! And you—y-you—”

Betrayal had plunged Childe into a froth of fury, but Zhongli had remained unshaken this entire time. Amidst chaos, rock is unmoved. Zhongli had allowed the tide of Childe’s rage to batter against his shores. Not once had he raised his hand or voice.

Instead, he had drawn warm baths for Childe to soak his screaming muscles. He had left fragrant plates of food to feed the gnawing hunger in his bones. He had brewed pot after pot of tea.

He had played the role of a devotee, waiting on Childe, waiting for Childe.

Childe’s eyes burn from the tenderness of it all. It shouldn’t be different, these elegant hands upon his scar-streaked skin, the velvet warmth of Zhongli’s mouth sinking down over his cock. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Because now Childe knows that these careful hands so delicately grazing his thighs and dancing around the faded bruises on his ribs had once carved the very land of Liyue. Lord of Geo, God of Stone, Groundbreaker. It’s different because Childe knows, now, who he is.

He hates and he wants and he hurts.

Viciously, he yanks again at Zhongli’s hair. “You’re still lying to me,” he snarls. “Stop lying to me. Show me who you are.”

“Childe,” Zhongli rasps, and Childe is fiercely satisfied by the roughness in his voice. He did that. “My Adeptal form is sometimes difficult for mortals to—”

“Show me!”

Zhongli takes in the wild look on Childe’s face, the hard turn of his mouth, the aching vulnerability in his azure eyes. Childe has always reached for the familiarity of fury whenever he feels fear.

“Very well, then,” Zhongli says.

And the room is submerged in gold.

Gold dust, gold light. It coalesces over Zhongli’s shoulders, washing over his arms like gilded rain, bright and brilliant and blinding. For a moment, Zhongli is so resplendent, so terribly divine, it hurts to look directly at him.

But still Childe beholds.

He beholds as Zhongli’s skin shimmers to scales. From his shoulders, flesh flakes to volcanic stone, dark obsidian threaded with patterns of gold. Radiant horns bloom from his crown like a quickening branch, carving up and over the silken fall of his hair. They shine in the lustre of the paper lanterns, in the resonating glow that pours outward from Zhongli’s molten core.

He is strange and he is beautiful and he looks so much like his carved statues that Childe marvels at his own stupidity.

“Is this what you want, Childe?” Zhongli says, low and grave. “Do you want Rex Lapis on his knees before you? Because here he is and here he shall stay.”

Zhongli’s hands are so warm on Childe’s skin, their touch so tender even though they’re tipped with talon claws. His fingers drag over Childe’s nipples, rolling and rubbing the hardening buds until they stand out pink and peaked on his chest. Between his thighs, Childe’s cock is hard and leaking.

Zhongli leans in and laps at a bead of precum and the sensation is so unexpectedly different that Childe startles. “What—?”

Warm breath fans over the tip of his cock. Zhongli chuckles and Childe’s cheeks flare again with rage at the thought that he’s laughing at him—this lying lover, this lying god—as though this is all some kind of joke. But when Childe looks down, he catches a coy promise on Zhongli’s sculpted face, a secret on the edge of its reveal.

Deliberately this time, Zhongli licks a languid line along the underside of Childe’s cock and did Childe just see—

“Y-you…w-what—what the fuck, Zhongli?”

A glimpse of a long, pink, forked tongue.

Zhongli showers a rain of kisses over the divots of Childe’s hips, threatening his skin with the taunt of his teeth.

“You were the one who told me to show you who I am,” he murmurs. The bedrock baritone of his voice is rich with enjoyment and desire. His lips smear droplets of blood across Childe’s taut abdomen before his forked tongue flicks out again, more obviously this time, lapping the mess away with its rough texture. “I think we should be honest with each other now.”

Childe keeps very still as Zhongli curls that long, draconic tongue around the base of his shaft and laps slowly up the length of it, sucks and slurps obscenely at the head. Inhale, exhale. Gold pulses between his thighs. Zhongli rounds his mouth around Childe’s cock, sinking down inch by inch, not stopping until Childe is firmly buried in the hot clench of his throat.

“F-fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Childe throws his head back with a groan. The cedar ceiling spins above him and Childe scrabbles for purchase, his palms finding the smooth curves of Zhongli’s majestic horns. His hands close around them and, when Childe tugs, Zhongli moans.

The sound trembles around Childe’s cock, a deep, luscious vibration. He gasps, his hips pitching forward without warning. The thrust is rude and a little mean, but Zhongli only makes that sound again, loosening his jaw, wordlessly encouraging Childe to fuck his throat with golden talons tight around his hips.

Childe feels as though it’s the first time he’s ever been touched. It’s all so overwhelming, the wet circle of Zhongli’s lips, the relentless suction of his hollowed cheeks, the friction of his tongue everywhere at once. Childe’s stuttered gasps melt under the squelching sound of Zhongli’s mouth around him. He thinks this should be blasphemy and yet somehow… somehow, it feels like worship.

Rough and messy, spit glistening over his chin and his throat bobbing around the head of Childe’s cock, Zhongli appears divine. It’s his eyes, the molten gold that never leaves Childe’s face, holding his gaze. Holding him.

Childe submits to the ecstasy of Zhongli’s care. He surrenders to the feeling of that hot mouth, those grounding hands—at once so novel and so achingly familiar. He surrenders to the way Zhongli surrenders to him in turn.

Ebb, flow. The tide inside Childe rises. Unfettered pleasure expands outwards, bursting in his chest, coursing through his limbs, spreading all the way to the fingers he has wrapped around the smooth carvings of Zhongli’s horns. Childe comes with a gasp, muscles seizing, eyes seeing nothing but gold, gold, gold. Caught in a riptide of bliss, he spills into Zhongli’s mouth. And then he falls—

falls,

falls,

—caught by the soft bed below, held together by Zhongli’s hands around his hips.

Zhongli swallows through it all, drinking Childe in, milking every last drop of pleasure. He cleans Childe’s softening cock with gentle licks, kisses tenderly at the scars over his inner thighs.

Inhale, exhale.

Slowly, Childe returns to himself. He rises to his elbows and blinks down at Zhongli through a shimmer of tears. Impassive, immaculate, divine Zhongli. The eyes of a god gaze back up at Childe with the same fondness they always have, the same adoring amber, the same hungry, white-hot pupils. Zhongli, Morax, Rex Lapis.

Childe launches himself from the bed into Rex Lapis’s arms. His kneecaps sting from their collision with the floor, but he pays the ache no mind.

“I’m sorry,” he cries, burying his face against Rex Lapis’s neck. His lips skim the liminal space where basalt scales melt to flushed skin. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I—”

I miss you. I need you. I love you.

“I know. I know. Childe, of course I know.”

There’s so much heat behind Rex Lapis’s words that Childe wonders if he spoke his thoughts out loud. He doesn’t care if he did. He wants Rex Lapis to know. He wants!

It’s softer this time when they kiss, the tide of Childe’s rage worn away by steady stone. His tongue swipes past Rex Lapis’s lips and the sea brine of his own pleasure dissolves wetly into his mouth. Rex Lapis sucks on Childe’s probing tongue, lets it stroke over the inside of his cheeks, lets it consume his own hunger.

Childe is breathless when he pulls back. His lips tingle, but Rex Lapis chases his mouth for more kisses. His forked tongue flicks tantalizingly against the seam of Childe’s lips, coaxing his mouth open in return. A warm breath of air slips free and then Rex Lapis is kissing him with such careful command that Childe’s bones tremble. It’s tender and devouring all at once, the slope of his lips, the stroke of his tongue, the threat of his dragon’s fangs.

Is this what it means to kiss a god?

Is this why Childe already wants again? It shouldn’t be possible, how much he wants again, already. Maybe it’s the result of being sucked off by a god, some strange adeptus biology, an ancient alchemy of—

Ha! Who is he kidding? It’s because it’s Zhongli. It’s always been Zhongli—Morax, Rex Lapis, whoever he is—it’s always been him.

Childe sways when Rex Lapis releases him, his lips red and swollen. His shaking hands descend to fumble at the fastenings of Rex Lapis’s straining pants. This entire time, he had devoted himself to Childe’s pleasure, not even granting himself the relief of removing the last of his clothes. The thought makes Childe’s chest ache. Frantic now, he shoves the finely-woven fabric down the carved lines of Rex Lapis’s narrow hips to free his—oh!

Oh!

He’s magnificent.

From between his powerful thighs rise not one but two glorious cocks, thick and hard and curving up against his belly. Like the not-quite-flesh of his arms, the shafts are a rich obsidian, glossy smooth and veined with striking lines of purest gold. The heads, too, are gold—gold and glowing—their lucent light pulsing in rhythm with the hastened beat of his heart.

“What the fuck.” This time, Childe breathes the words in the barest whisper, tinted with devastating awe.

Wide eyes dart upward, seeking permission. At Rex Lapis’s indulgent nod, Childe wraps a hand around one of those beautiful, radiant cocks, weighing its heft in his palm. It jumps against his skin, hot and throbbing. A glistening, amber bead of precum leaks from the slit and Childe collects it on the pad of his thumb. It shines like wild honey.

“H-how should I—?”

Rex Lapis leans forward and kisses the corner of Childe’s mouth. “You know how, Childe. It isn’t any different from before.”

Childe snorts inelegantly. “Last I checked, Rex Lapis, Zhongli doesn’t have two dicks.”

Rex Lapis’s amusement rumbles from his sculpted chest. This time, Childe understands the laughter not as mockery but as benediction.

“I can change back if you would prefer,” he murmurs into Childe’s mouth. “If this form is too much—”

“No!” Childe is surprised by the surety in his own voice. “No, I want… I want to.”

Childe’s hands wander over Rex Lapis’s skin, lingering on the striking gradient where pale flesh cedes to unyielding stone. Featherlight at first, his fingertips follow the veins of gold that flow along the smooth slope of a dark shoulder, the ridge of a bicep, the vale of a forearm. He adds a scrape of nails on the way back up, sweeping his palms across the plains of Rex Lapis’s chest, dipping into the valleys of his hips.

“You’re beautiful,” Childe blurts out. “You always are, but like this… I’ve never seen anything like this.” His fingers are back on that shoreline near his collarbones, that liminal meeting of light and dark, skin to scale.

Rex Lapis makes a pleased hum.

In this divine form, Rex Lapis’s nipples appear as scintillating gems of cor lapis. Childe circles them with his thumbs, wondering if they’re as sensitive as they are in his human disguise. He gets his answer when he rolls the hard crystal nubs between his fingers; Rex Lapis gasps, his amber eyes leaving Childe’s face to flutter closed in pleasure.

Again, Childe rubs at those golden nipples, pinching and twisting them to the music of Rex Lapis’s moans. Bending his head, Childe takes one into his mouth, sucking softly and flicking it with his tongue, tasting the earthy, mineral richness of him, the faint metallic edge that clings to the back of Childe’s throat. Teeth clink against the nipple’s bright surface when Childe bites down gently, teasingly, before he soothes the sting with a languid lick. He mirrors the action on the other side.

When Childe pulls back, the facets of those stiff nipples shine with spit and Rex Lapis’s eyes burn white-hot with pleasure.

Ah—how suddenly the impatience of a dragon breaks through Zhongli’s careful control! Silken strands of dark hair caress Childe’s cheek and Rex Lapis drags him up into a hungry kiss. A low growl pours into Childe’s mouth before those devouring lips smear sharp kisses over his jaw, scraping red lines along a path to his throat. Teeth clamp down, nearly tearing skin and Childe gasps, hands scrabbling at Rex Lapis’s shoulders.

Abruptly, Rex Lapis retreats. He seems equal parts ravenous and appalled. “Childe, I didn’t mean to… as the Prime Adeptus, I am not used to—”

Childe lifts a hand to his own throat. Gingerly, he runs his fingertips over the raised bruise that’s already started to form. He imagines he can feel the indents of each of Rex Lapis’s teeth. It stings under his own touch—a tantalizing ache.

“Do that again,” he whispers.

“Childe…”

Darting out a hand, Childe catches a horn and tugs. He draws Rex Lapis back in, returning that sharp mouth to the bared expanse of his throat, settled right above the point of his thundering pulse. “Again,” he rasps. “Do that again.”

Zhongli is gentle. Zhongli is sweet. Zhongli lavishes Childe with soft caresses and quiet kisses.

But Rex Lapis is a dragon. Rex Lapis is a god. And Rex Lapis accepts this offering.

Fangs sink into the tender flesh where neck meets shoulder and Childe makes a choked-off sound. It’s been so long, but his body remembers how to react to the pleasure in the pain, that beautiful undercurrent of violence that sharpens into ecstasy. Pleasure, pain. Two become one. Sensation thrums through him, hot and heady, and his cock jumps against his belly. Over and over, Rex Lapis nips and bites at Childe’s skin, decorating his throat with a necklace of bruises, bright red blooms like a collar of camelias.

“Do you like that?” Rex Lapis’s words smudge a line of spit and blood across Childe’s clavicles. Here too, he leaves a merciless line of marks. “Perhaps I should not be surprised to find that you enjoy pain, Childe. Or, if names and titles still matter to you, should I ask if it is Tartaglia who is the little masochist?”

“A-ah!” Childe’s cheeks scald scarlet at words. He squirms, but the humiliation only kindles his desire.

Gold-tipped claws carve shallow lines on either side of Childe’s sweat-slicked spine and sweet pain sparks over his skin. A breathy whimper leaves his throat. His hips buck against Zhongli’s taut abdomen, aching erection rubbing against both of Rex Lapis’s smooth, glowing cocks.

He wants. He wants. He wants.

“You, too, have secrets you have not yet shared with me, is that not right?” Rex Lapis croons against the fading lightning figures that web across Childe’s chest. “One day, you will tell me all your secrets.”

“Is that an order or a promise?”

“Hmm, yes.”

Before Childe can protest the non-answer, a warm, wet mouth covers his own. Rex Lapis tastes of copper this time, his lips soft and slick around the knife-pricks of his teeth, and Childe is panting now, panting into Rex Lapis’s kisses, panting around the forked tongue that fucks into his mouth. Another promise. Another. Another.

Something slithers up around Childe’s thigh and he startles. Rex Lapis’s lips curl against his in merriment before he backs away and allows Childe to look. A lustrous tail coils over his bare skin, richly adorned with scales of smoky quartz and warm citrine, tipped with fluffy golden plumage. Teasingly, the feathers tickle over Childe’s cock, beckoning a high whine from his lips.

Of course the dragon would have a tail.

“Touch me, Childe.”

This time, Childe recognizes the words for the order that they are.

Fearlessly now, Childe’s fingers wrap around one of Rex Lapis’s cocks. The obsidian almost-skin is smooth against the rough catch of his palm, glossy like a polished gem. How wonderous! How strange! But the sound Rex Lapis makes when Childe squeezes under the crown is exactly the same, a full-throated moan rich with arousal.

A tug of the tail around his thigh compels Childe to shuffle closer on his aching knees. Their chests are nearly touching, heated skin and solid stone. Childe feels a little silly, his own pink cock nestling beside both of Rex Lapis’s glorious, glowing dicks, dripping messy lines of precum that shine pearl-like in the radiant light he emits.

Then Rex Lapis’s hand is in his hair, claws skimming the back of Childe’s skull, thumb swiping over the shell of his ear.

“Good. Mmm, very good,” Rex Lapis growls, and Childe no longer feels silly at all.

Childe widens his hand to make space for the second cock and Rex Lapis groans, his head tipping back in pleasure. And oh, what a marvelous sight that is, this golden god, this god of stone, this groundbreaker baring his neck to Childe’s kisses.

It’s easy, now, for Childe to lose himself in the familiarity of touching him. Firmly, he strokes Rex Lapis, feeling his arousal throb against his calloused palm. His thumb kneads at the sensitive gland on the underside of one glowing cockhead, swiping at the slit to collect the precum that gleams like golden dew drops.

A powerful thrum fills the room, buzzing warmly around him. Childe’s face cracks into a beaming grin at the realization: Rex Lapis is purring. Childe splays his free hand over that chiseled chest and feels the vibrations resonate into his own bones.

“Do you like this, Rex Lapis?”

“Mmm—yes, yes,” Rex Lapis growls before chasing Childe’s lips for kisses. He’s close now, hips pitching into the tight grip of Childe’s hand. His careful composure is cracking.

Over the months they’ve known each other, Childe has lost count of how many times he’s made Zhongli come. But he’s never gotten a god off before—not like this— and Rex Lapis’s biology fascinates him beyond measure. Will both cocks finish at once? Will his cum be the same luxurious gold that leaks from the glowing tips and slicks the slide of Childe’s palm?

Childe isn’t sure where to look. He is mesmerized by the vision of Rex Lapis’s twin cocks: by the way they glisten with precum as though dipped in honey; by the way the glowing lines pulse through the ring of Childe’s hand with every forward fuck of those narrow hips. The sight of it is beyond erotic. But Childe is just as captivated by the pleasure etched over Rex Lapis’s face, the pink tint to his cheeks, the slack circle of his kiss-bitten mouth.

“Childe!”

Gold washes through the room and Childe can’t tear his eyes away. Even as he feels Rex Lapis pulse thickly within his fist, covering his fingers with hot cum, he watches those sculpted features. He watches Rex Lapis’s eyes go wide with ecstasy, watches his mouth go lax around his groan of pleasure. Childe eases him through it. Only when Rex Lapis’s damp eyelashes flutter closed does Childe consume the sight of his own hand covered in ribbons of liquid gold and one of those glorious cocks still hard and throbbing in his palm.

“Oh.” Childe’s lips curl in a smile, his expression gleeful and a touch wicked. “Oh, I like this.”

The admission earns him a lazy smirk and—ah, there it is! There is the godly pride that Childe had expected, the easy confidence of an Adeptus. No, of the Prime Adeptus.

“I should have known that this form would please an insatiable creature like you.”

“I think I’m angry again,” Childe says, chuckling. “You were holding out on me all this time.”

He yelps when the ground disappears beneath him. Fleetingly, he thinks he’s falling until he recognizes the surety of Rex Lapis’s arms around him, setting him effortlessly onto the bed. After divesting himself of the rest of his clothing, Rex Lapis follows, arranging their bodies so they face each other on their sides, mouths so close they’re almost kissing again.

“Perhaps, one day, I shall find a way to atone,” he says against Childe’s lips, letting him taste the contract of his words. Claws drag over Childe’s chest, leaving shallow red lines in their wake. With excruciating care, Rex Lapis draws a circle around the leaking head of Childe’s straining cock and Childe wheezes, hips canting up for more.

“This is—a-ah—this is a start,” he gasps.

Rex Lapis takes his time, stroking the length of Childe’s cock, massaging the sensitive tip, squeezing tightly around his shaft. The touch is made slick and easy by the silken spill of golden cum, and Childe thinks briefly about how sacrilegious this all seems—divine seed smeared over his skin, a look of earnest devotion in the draconic slits of Rex Lapis’s pupils.

It’s achingly slow and painfully sweet and when Rex Lapis takes Childe’s hand in his own and curls it around both their cocks, Childe keens. Gold veins ripple over Rex Lapis’s arms as he guides their hands, shifting fluidly from languid strokes to hard, fast pumps. Ebb, flow. The air is thick with the earthy fragrance of petrichor and the wet sounds of their bodies moving together. The smooth shaft of Rex Lapis’s cock twitches against Childe’s flushed skin and Childe bucks forward into the tight coil of their interwtined fingers, chasing his pleasure. Close, close.

Then comes Morax’s brutality! Ruthlessly, he draws their joined hands away and Childe cries out, yearning for more. He ruts his hips, grinding their cocks together in search of the friction he’d been suddenly denied. But Rex Lapis is unyielding as the mountains he once formed. Digging a talon into the meat of Childe’s ass, he holds him close, trapping their erections between them and keeping Childe still.

“Tell me what you want,” he commands, nipping again at the tender flesh of Childe’s neck, adding to the marks he’d left before.

Childe whimpers. Tears threaten his waterline. “F-fuck you.”

Rex Lapis laughs. “Tell me, Childe. Don’t fight it. Tell me what you want.”

He wants… he wants…

“You!” Childe shouts—too loud, too hoarse, too much. He’s always been too much. He’s always wanted too much. Behold, a man who craves the love of a god. “I want you! I’ve always wanted you!”

The force of the admission feels like an earthquake. Childe can’t dwell on the raw shame of it because Rex Lapis is growling, returning their hands between their bodies, pumping both of their cocks, his fist tighter and faster than before.

The storm builds again. Childe feels the tide of it raging behind his navel, waves and waves coaxed out by the steady strokes of their interlocked hands.

Once, Rex Lapis had used his hands to sculpt the peaks and valleys of Liyue, to carve every cliff and crystal, to shape his beloved landscape. Once, Childe had used his hands to unleash a tempest over the harbour, calling forth pure water and corrupted sky, nearly rending himself in two. Childe had been dispatched to Liyue on a mission that was fated to fail—a diversion that would pass through Rex Lapis’s life as brief and ineffective as a rainstorm. He had only intended to draw Rex Lapis out. But he had fallen and he had drowned and now Rex Lapis is here and Rex Lapis is Zhongli, and Zhongli is stretched out before him, molten-eyed and loving, loving Childe, loving the man sent here for his celestial heart.

“Zhongli! Zhongli, I—” Childe gasps. They’re pressed so tightly together now, bathed in resplendent light. Childe reaches out his free hand to grasp one of those smooth golden horns, pulling Zhongli’s head to his own for a desperate kiss.

“Childe, ah, I missed you,” Zhongli hisses into his mouth. “Oh, how I missed you.” He too has tears in his eyes, sparkling like cut diamonds below the white-hot fire of his pupils. For weeks, Childe had felt so far away, a vast ocean between them, hollow as those azure eyes. But now Childe is here, brimming with lust and life in Zhongli’s arms, his cock throbbing hot against his own.

Stone and sea and a shoreline of ecstasy.

Pleasure peaks and then they’re both coming—cresting and crashing and spilling between their shaking bodies. Childe sees nothing but white and gold, hears nothing but Zhongli’s roar in his ears, filling the hollow spaces between each thrum of his pounding heart. Cum slicks their slowing fists, and Childe sobs, shuddering as Zhongli drains every last drop of his release, lavishing kisses over his neck, his lips, his cheeks.

“Childe,” Zhongli breathes. He presses their foreheads together. Proximity blurs their lashes into tapestries of copper and quartz, thick and wet with tears. “Childe. Tartaglia.”

When Zhongli opens his eyes, they burn like molten gold. Just like that, Childe is vanquished.

“Ajax,” he chokes out. “My name is Ajax.”

Zhongli doesn’t point out Childe’s hypocrisy, his own name held hidden in the frail cage of his chest. He could. He has every right to. But Zhongli only strokes his clean talons through Childe’s damp hair and adds the name to his prayer. “Ajax,” he whispers. “Childe, Tartaglia, Ajax.”

They must make quite the scene in this dark bedroom, their limbs locked together in a trembling embrace, the soft plumage of Zhongli’s tail rising to trace tender lines over Childe’s back. The lanterns’ red candles have long burned themselves out in plumes of vaporised wax. Now, the only light comes from Zhongli, from his glowing palms and the thrumming patterns that shine from his molten core. In the velvet dark, their radiant gleam turns the silver sprawl of Childe’s scars to a lustrous gold.

“You have me, Childe.” Zhongli whispers the words into sweat-slicked skin. “You have always had me.”

Childe wakes at daybreak to an empty bed and the smell of spring. Sunbeams catch over the freckles on his shoulders when he rolls into the vacated space at his side. The downy sheets are still warm beneath his cheek, smelling richly of sandalwood and star anise.

“Did I wake you?”

Zhongli stands under the doorframe, holding a bamboo tray laden with fragrant baozi and all the trimmings for tea. He’s the picture of elegance—even now, even with all his regalia cast aside—his graceful silhouette made somehow more beautiful by leisure. Unbound, the strands of his ink-dark hair flow generously over his broad shoulders, their ends glittering as though they’ve been spun to gold by the sunrise’s rosy fingers. He wears a robe of jade silk bound loosely at the waist with diaphanous sleeves that drape down like crystalfly wings.

Not for the first time, Childe marvels at his own past ignorance. How short-sighted he had been not to have recognized Zhongli for the god he was. Even in repose, he is every inch divine.

I love him more each time I see him.

“You have a look about you, Ajax,” Zhongli says playfully. He sets the tray down on the nightstand and reclaims his space in their bed, tucking Childe’s head against his chest. His fingers weave their way into the careless mess of copper curls. Coaxing them into order has always been a futile endeavor and yet Zhongli’s tireless hands never stop trying. “What are you thinking?”

A blush blooms across Childe’s cheeks. These days, Zhongli is always asking what he’s thinking. Childe doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it. He’s always been a man of action—at his most honest in the flurry of a fight. But there’s something about Zhongli’s easy affection that draws out his confessions: memories of past hurts, declarations of love, erotic admissions that leave his ears as red as his hair.

“Oh, you know. This and that.”

Childe skims his lips above the collar of Zhongli’s robes, nipping at the pale skin of his clavicles. His tongue traces the bright red ring of teeth still fresh from last night when the two of them had tumbled into bed upon their return from the opera. It had been a glorious performance (and, Childe supposes, the opera was nice too).

Zhongli’s back arches. His hands roam reverently over Childe’s bare skin, sliding along his spine, stroking over the shapes of his sides. With an arm around his waist, Zhongli hoists Childe onto his lap and cradles him close, kissing down the column of his throat. Zhongli’s cock begins to stir beneath his robes and Childe groans, grinding his own naked erection against the gauzy fabric. He revels in the pleasure of it, in the victory of a successful diversion.

But then Zhongli tugs Childe’s head back gently by the hair and holds him in place. Amber meets azure and Childe finds himself falling again, falling the way he always does—caught the way he always is.

“Come now, Ajax,” Zhongli says, mouth so close that Childe feels the syllables on his lips. “We said no more secrets.”

No more secrets. No more lies. They had promised each other the truth.

“I was thinking that I’m falling in love with you all over again.” The words come out surprisingly steady. Childe always expects to feel more embarrassed than he does whenever he says these things.

Maybe it’s because of how pleased they make Zhongli. Maybe it’s because of how easily they make him smile. That’s another thing Childe has noticed since their tender reconciliation: how often Zhongli smiles.

Zhongli tilts forward and presses his lips to Childe’s. He kisses him deeply, slowly, sweetly. In the dawn’s honey-warmth, he takes his time lavishing Childe’s mouth with wet and tender kisses, nibbling his lower lip until it tingles, teasing Childe with a cheeky dart of a forked tongue.

The surprise of it makes Childe yelp. He jumps back and swats Zhongli’s shoulder. “No fair,” he says. Then he leans back in. “Do it again.”

Zhongli laughs, but he only presses a chaste peck to the corner of Childe’s kiss-swollen mouth. “Oh, I know that look well. If I do that again, breakfast will get cold and we will never leave this bed until late afternoon.”

“And that’s a problem because…?” Childe walks his fingers down the planes of Zhongli’s chest, teasing over the belt that holds his robes.

“Insatiable rascal. You need to eat something.”

Before Childe can make a crass remark about what, precisely, he’s in the mood to eat right now, Zhongli flips Childe back onto the bed and reaches for the tray. The bao have already begun to cool, their fluffy wrappers no longer steaming, but they smell mouth-wateringly of minced pork and fresh ginger.

Childe’s stomach growls. In the tranquility of the early morning, the sound is loud, and he has the decency to look a little sheepish. Zhongli chuckles. His own expression is one of smug satisfaction.

“Fine,” Childe sighs. “You win. This time.”

But before he can grab one of the pillowy buns, he catches sight of Zhongli preparing to pour their tea and his hand hovers in the air between.

Cradled in Zhongli’s steady hands is a small zisha teapot. The zisha teapot, the unassuming vessel made of purple clay Childe had once unceremoniously shattered in his rage to call forth a floral tide of Da Hong Pao. Under Zhongli’s slender fingers, Childe spies fine veins of gold. His breath catches.

“You repaired the teapot,” he says.

Zhongli’s features soften. “Yes, I was… ah, I was feeling rather sentimental.”

He holds the teapot out to Childe, his palms curving below it to reveal the gilded seams: three narrow, jagged streams that sprawl from a glimmering pool, a gold-filled hollow where a tiny piece of clay had been lost.

Golden joinery. The Inazuman art of kintsugi. Zhongli had told Childe all about the technique one humid day in front of Xigu Antiques. Do you see these lines that shimmer through the porcelain? Zhongli asked as they appraised a scarred cup, their heads bowed so close together that it would have been nothing for them to have kissed. They have a story to tell.

Childe traces one of the golden veins. Scars and gold and the summation of memories, a record of every leaf and stone. A story. Through a wet lace of copper lashes, he looks up at Zhongli. “I think it’s even more beautiful than it was before.”

“Yes,” Zhongli says. His own eyes brim with fondness, crinkled at the corners and overfull with joy. He pours their tea and hands a cup to Childe. “More beautiful indeed.”