char

heaven, be gentle tonight

[chuuyanakahras]

NAVIGATION !!!

✧ intro !

char! legal. fanfic writer when the thoughts exit my brain. shoko ieiri apologist and biggest fan of charismatic evil men. x reader here but im better on the ao3 😛

✧ masterlist !

my fandoms: MCU, DCU, genshin impact, bsd, jjk, harry potter, the hunger games, owari no seraph

requests are open!

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[chuuyanakahras]

just redownloaded genshin after 3 years #huge

[chuuyanakahras]

WHISPERS OF WINTER

childe x reader content: hanahaki disease, angst, sad ending notes: character death. i love hanahaki disease if u dont know. happy ending coming soon tho! despite my incessant xiaopostings childe actually is my favorite character believe it or not. i told u i like them charizzmatic and evil. lowk my fav fic ive written so far masterlist

There is a particular quality to winter in Morepesok that exists nowhere else in Teyvat.

Not the cold itself — cold is cold, and you have read about Dragonspine's shadow in the books Ajax sends from his postings, have heard him describe the Shogunate's seasonal grey and the frost coming in off the sea in Liyue Harbor, and none of it is precisely the same as the cold of home, but all of it is recognizably winter. What is particular to Morepesok is the silence. The way snow falls there with a completeness that feels deliberate, like the sky making a decision, like the world choosing, for a few months every year, to muffle everything that might otherwise be too loud. You grew up inside that silence. You learned, inside it, how to hear the things people weren't saying.

You learned that skill, mostly, from Ajax.

Ajax, who was loud about everything except the things that mattered. Who would throw himself headfirst into any physical confrontation with a grin that suggested he found the possibility of being hurt genuinely funny, who argued with his father about dinner and his mother about curfew and Teucer about absolutely nothing with the cheerful aggression of someone who had decided conflict was just another word for engagement — and who went absolutely, completely silent on the subjects that meant the most. Who said nothing about the Abyss for years after he came back from it. Who said nothing about the Tsaritsa's commission beyond what was required. Who carried things alone because carrying things alone was the only methodology he trusted.

You had always understood this about him. You had understood it and loved him for it and occasionally wanted to shake him for it, and the understanding had been, for most of your life, entirely sufficient. It had been sufficient until sometime last spring, when you had woken up one morning with a feeling in your chest that was not quite pain and not quite anything you had vocabulary for, a pressure behind the sternum that you had at first attributed to the seasonal shift, to the grey weeks between winter and spring that Morepesok did particularly badly.

By May you were coughing petals into your palm and you understood that it was not the season.

You had known Ajax since before he was Childe, before he was Tartaglia, before he was the Eleventh Harbinger of the Fatui or anything else the world had decided to make of him. You had known him when he was simply the boy next door in the most literal possible sense, the boy who had appeared at your fence one September morning when you were both six years old and informed you, with the directness that would come to define him, that you were going to be friends.

"I didn't agree to that," you had told him.

"You will," he had said, and climbed over the fence, and that had been that.

His mother, Natalya, had found the two of you an hour later in the back field attempting to build what Ajax had described, with great confidence, as a fortification, and what was in reality a pile of sticks that would not have fortified anything against so much as a mild breeze. She had brought you both inside, made tea, fed you something warm, and looked at the two of you across her kitchen table with the expression of a woman who understood exactly how this was going to go and had simply decided to be gracious about it.

You had spent more time in that kitchen than your own after that. You had eaten there, studied there, helped Natalya with the younger children when they came along one by one, watched Ajax grow from the boy who climbed fences into something larger and more complicated, something the world kept reaching into and rearranging without asking permission. You had been there when he disappeared into the Abyss. You had been there when he came back, changed in the way that those places changed people — fundamentally himself, but shifted on some axis that nobody could quite identify, the same picture in a different frame. His eyes the same color and somehow different in the way they assessed things, the way they moved through a room now, always finding exits, always running numbers.

You had been there for all of it. You had been there so completely, so continuously, with such unbroken presence, that the shift — when it came — was impossible to date with any precision. There was no morning you could point to and say: here. Here is where it changed. There was only the accumulation, the slow geological deposit of years, until the feeling had become part of the landscape and you had stopped being able to see it as a separate thing from simply being alive.

That, the physician in Zapolyarny would tell you later, with a careful voice and careful eyes, is precisely the kind that takes root deepest.

The first petal you found in your palm was white. Small. The shape of a snowdrop, which was almost funny, which was almost too on the nose for a place that spent half the year under snow, and you had looked at it for a long time in the early morning light of your kitchen before closing your hand around it.

You knew what it was. Everyone in Snezhnaya knew what it was — the folk songs made sure of that, the particular Snezhnayan literary tradition that had decided hanahaki was romantic, that had decided there was something beautiful about love that bloomed in the chest, that had written three centuries of poetry about flowers and longing and conveniently left out what happened to the body that hosted them. You had grown up on those songs the way you'd grown up on the cold, absorbing them as part of the landscape, and you had never once imagined they would become relevant.

You were twenty-nine years old. You had known Ajax for twenty-three of those years. The idea that what you felt for him was unrequited was almost too absurd to hold in your head at first, because unrequited implied a distance that didn't exist, implied a separateness, and you and Ajax were not separate, had not been separate since the fence, and so what you felt for him had always read, to some part of you, as reciprocal by nature — as something shared rather than something singular, the way the cold was shared, the way the silence was shared.

But the petal was in your hand. And the petal said otherwise.

You thought, standing in your kitchen in the early morning: Ajax does not love you the way you love him. Ajax loves you the way you love him minus the specific thing that makes your hands go still when he walks into a room, minus the thing that makes his voice through a wall enough to settle something in your chest that didn't know it was unsettled, minus the thing that had been growing quietly in you for years, depositing itself in layers, until it became flowers.

You opened your hand. The petal sat in your palm in the morning light.

You closed your hand again, and got dressed, and went to work, and did not tell anyone.

That was in May. By the time winter came again and Ajax came home on leave, you had seen the physician twice, filled a small glass jar with what the coughing produced, and become very good at the particular skill of managing something in private that would cause significant disruption if it became public.

The physician's name was Katya, and she was neither unkind nor falsely optimistic, which you appreciated. She had seen hanahaki before — not often, but enough to have a professional relationship with its mechanics rather than a poetic one. She examined you and reviewed your history and set down her notes and said, in the even voice of someone delivering information rather than judgment:

"How long has the feeling been present."

"I don't know exactly," you said. "It built gradually. I can't find the start of it."

"But your best estimate," she said.

You thought about it honestly, which you hadn't let yourself do before. You thought about the year he came back from the Abyss, and how the shift in him had made something protective surge in your chest so strongly it had alarmed you, and how you had explained it to yourself as the natural response of a close friend, and how you had believed that explanation thoroughly enough to stop examining it. That had been — seven years ago. Perhaps more.

"Long," you said.

Katya made a note. "Long-standing cases are more complex," she said. "The growth has had time to establish itself. There are treatments that slow the progression — I'd recommend beginning those immediately. And there is, of course, the surgical option."

"I know about the surgical option," you said.

"The surgery would remove the growth entirely," she said. "The flowers would stop. You would recover fully." A pause. "You would retain all memories of the person in question. The relationship would be intact. What the surgery removes is the specific quality of feeling that feeds the growth. The love itself, in its current form."

"I understand," you said.

"I'd like you to consider it seriously," she said. "In cases like yours, the timeline without intervention can be—" she paused, choosing, "—the flowers take up space that other things need. It's not immediate. But it is, eventually, inevitable."

"I understand," you said again.

She looked at you for a moment with the look of someone who suspects that I understand and I will act accordingly are not the same statement in this particular patient's mouth. She was correct, but you didn't confirm it, and she didn't push it, and you went home with a treatment schedule and the jar of petals and the quiet knowledge that you were not going to the surgeon.

You had not fully articulated this to yourself yet. It was not yet a decision so much as an absence of a different decision, a failure to choose the other thing, and you were content to let it live in that ambiguous space for the time being, while you focused on the more immediate matter of Ajax coming home.

He came home the way he always did — all at once, loudly, filling the house with the specific energy of a person who had been somewhere dangerous and was making up for it by being extremely present somewhere safe. You heard him from your own house, Teucer's shout and then the sound of Ajax's laugh, which carried, which had always carried, which you had used as a locating tool since childhood.

You went over that first evening, as you always did, because Natalya knocked on your door with the same words she'd used for twenty years: he's home. And you put on your coat and walked the twenty steps between your door and hers and came into the kitchen where he was already seated at the table with Tonia on one side and Teucer attempting to climb him like a structure, and he looked up when you came in.

The grin. The specific one. The one that was — and you registered this now with the clarity of someone who had spent six months knowing what they were looking at — different from the ones he gave other people, containing something the others didn't, some quality you had always registered without naming.

"You look terrible," he said.

"You look like you haven't slept in a week," you said.

"Two weeks," he said, cheerfully. "Come sit down, Natalya made the good soup."

You sat down. You ate the soup. You listened to Teucer's stories and Tonia's careful questions and watched Ajax with his family, the way he was with them, the way all the combat precision and the Harbinger authority folded itself entirely away and left only this — a boy from Morepesok who loved his family with the same whole-body commitment he brought to everything else. This was the thing the world didn't know about him. This softness, so at odds with what he'd become, so stubbornly intact underneath all of it.

You felt, sitting at that table with the snow against the windows and the soup warm in your hands, the familiar pressure in your chest. You breathed through it carefully. You did not cough.

Later, washing dishes with Natalya while Ajax was put to work reading to the younger ones, she stood beside you and said, quietly, without preamble: "You seem thinner."

"It's been a busy autumn," you said.

She looked at you. Natalya's looks were their own form of communication, complete sentences conveyed entirely through the quality of attention. She had been doing this since you were six years old and she had been reading you accurately for all of that time.

"Are you well," she said, and the way she said it was not small talk.

"I'm fine," you said, which was what you said to everyone, which was the sentence you had built into a reflex over six months of practice.

She looked at you for another moment. Then she went back to drying dishes, and neither of you said anything else, and you understood from the quality of her silence that she was filing something, that she was going to return to it, and you would need to be careful.

You managed well, for the first week. The treatments Katya had given you helped — not much, not enough, but enough that you could go a day without the cough surfacing, if you were careful. If you rested. If you didn't laugh too hard or walk too fast or sit in a cold room for too long, all of which were conditions that proved difficult to maintain in Ajax's company.

He found you, on the eighth day, sitting on the back porch.

You had come out because the kitchen had felt too warm and the warm was making it worse, and you had been sitting on the top step for ten minutes breathing the cold air carefully when the door opened behind you and he came out and sat down beside you with the ease of twenty-three years, the ease of two people who had spent enough time in shared silence that silence required no explanation.

"Too loud in there," he said.

"Little bit," you said.

The field was white and still. The amber lights his mother had strung on the porch twenty years ago cast their small warm reflection in the snow, doubling themselves in every flat surface. You sat beside him and felt the cold doing its quiet work in your chest, the pressure easing slightly the way it sometimes did in cold air, and breathed carefully.

"You've been quiet this trip," he said.

"You've been loud enough for both of us," you said.

"I'm serious." He wasn't looking at you. He was looking at the field, in the way he looked at things when he was thinking carefully about them. "Something's different."

"Nothing's different," you said.

"Don't," he said, and the word had a quality that stopped you, a flatness that was not unfriendly but was very direct. "You've been doing that thing where you're managing something and pretending you're not. I know what that looks like. I invented that."

"You did invent that," you agreed, carefully.

"So what is it," he said.

You looked at the field. The snow was doing its continuous soft work, adding to itself, patient and thorough. You thought about telling him. You thought about the words that would carry the information from inside you to the air between you, and you ran them, and they came out wrong every way you arranged them, every arrangement either too much or not enough, either requiring him to do something with a feeling he didn't have or requiring you to watch his face do the thing faces did when they were deciding how to be kind about something.

"I haven't been sleeping well," you said. "The autumn was long."

He looked at you. The same look his mother used, you had always thought — that quality of full attention, of someone reading the space between words.

"Okay," he said, finally. Not convinced. Allowing it.

You sat on the porch until the cold drove you inside, and you did not cough while he was there, and when you got home you coughed for a long time into your cupped hands over the sink and looked at what came up and thought: I have to be more careful.

Natalya found out on the twelfth day.

Not because you told her. Because you were Natalya's and had been for twenty-three years, and Natalya had watched you grow up in her kitchen, and Natalya noticed things that other people were not looking for.

She found you in the morning, in the kitchen before anyone else was awake, and she set tea in front of you and sat down across the table and looked at you in the way she had always looked at you when she had something to say that needed saying.

"Show me your hands," she said.

"Natalya—"

"Show me your hands."

You opened your hands on the table. You had been careful, you had thought you had been careful, but there was a faint staining at the edge of two fingers, the kind that came from what you'd been coughing into your palm and wiping quickly, the kind that was almost invisible in poor light and was not invisible in morning kitchen light to a woman who had been watching your hands since you were six years old.

She looked at your hands for a long moment. Then she looked at your face.

"How long," she said.

"Since May," you said.

The sound she made was not quite a word. She reached across the table and took your hands in both of hers, and held them there, and said nothing for a long moment, and you sat in her kitchen in the early morning light while the house slept and felt, for the first time since May, the specific relief of being known by someone.

"Have you seen someone," she said.

"A physician in Zapolyarny," you said. "I have treatments. They help."

"The surgery," she said.

"I'm not having the surgery," you said.

Her hands tightened on yours, fractionally. She looked at you with an expression you had never seen on her face before, or had seen and never had it directed at you — the face she made when one of her children was doing something that frightened her.

"You have to," she said, quietly. "You understand that without it—"

"I know," you said.

"Then why," she said, and her voice was very careful, the voice of someone who already knows the answer and needs to hear it said.

You looked down at her hands over yours. Large, warm, the hands that had made tea and soup and everything warm in your life that you hadn't made yourself. You thought about how to say it honestly.

"He has been," you started, and stopped, and started again. "He has been the main thing in my life for twenty-three years. The friendship, the family, all of it, you, the children — it is the architecture. It is what my life is built on." You looked up at her. "The surgery removes the source. I know what it removes. And I can't—I can't have it taken from me and then stand next to him and remember that it used to be there and feel the shape of where it was." You paused. "I would rather have it and die of it than live without it next to him."

Natalya looked at you for a very long time.

"That is the most foolish thing," she said, softly, "that anyone has ever said in my kitchen."

"Probably," you agreed.

"He would not want this," she said. "If he knew—"

"He can't know," you said, immediately, and something in your voice had an edge that surprised you both. "Natalya. Please. He cannot know. Not because I don't trust him, but because—" you searched for it, "—because if he knows, he will try to fix it. You know him. He will decide it's his problem to solve and he will do something, and whatever he does will be from guilt or from love for me as his friend and I can't—I can't be something he manages. I can't spend whatever time I have watching him perform something he doesn't feel." You held her eyes. "Please."

The kitchen was very quiet. Outside the window the snow was beginning again, the way it always began in Morepesok, without announcement.

"He leaves in six days," she said, finally.

"I know," you said.

She looked at your hands in hers for a long moment. Then she pressed them, once, firmly, and released them, and stood, and put the kettle on again, and did not look at you while she did it, and you understood from the quality of her stillness that she was doing the hardest thing she knew how to do with information she couldn't change: she was holding it.

"You'll eat breakfast," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," you said.

"Every morning you come here," she said. "While he's home, after he leaves. Every morning."

"Okay," you said.

She set a bowl in front of you and sat back down and poured the tea and you ate in the morning quiet of her kitchen with the snow falling outside and the house sleeping above you, and she did not ask you again, and you loved her for it, added it to the long accumulation of reasons, the twenty-three years of mornings just like this one.

You were careful, for the remaining six days. You were careful in the way you had learned to be careful over six months of practice, which was to say completely and quietly and in a manner designed to be invisible to the person you most wanted to see clearly.

Ajax, for his part, was being Ajax, which made careful more difficult than it should have been. He had a talent for proximity that had nothing to do with the combat instincts — the way he existed in space, always oriented toward the people he cared about, always angled in slightly, always present in the specific way of someone who had learned, in the Abyss, what absence actually meant and had decided since then to be very thoroughly here when he was here.

He found you on the road three days before he left. You had been walking back from the village and you were cold and you had let yourself get cold, which was careless, and the cold was doing the thing it did when you let it get too far, tightening something in your chest that tightened further when you walked fast, and you slowed down, and you were managing it, and then you heard his footsteps behind you and felt, in your chest, the familiar specific response to his proximity that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with May.

"Wait up," he called.

You waited. You breathed carefully. He caught up to you and fell into step beside you the way he always did, your pace matching without either of you adjusting for it, the unconscious synchronization of two people who had been walking beside each other for decades.

"You left before dinner," he said.

"I had things to do," you said.

"You always have things to do when you're avoiding something," he said. "You've been avoiding something all week. Every time I—" he stopped walking, and you stopped beside him because you were synchronized, you couldn't help it, and he turned to look at you on the road in the grey afternoon light, and his face had the quality it got when he was not performing anything, when the Harbinger and the grin and all the constructed armor had been set aside and he was simply Ajax. "Talk to me," he said.

"There's nothing to talk about," you said.

"You're lying to me," he said, and his voice was not accusatory — it was something quieter, something that sat in the neighborhood of hurt without quite being it, the voice of someone who knows the shape of a lie when it comes from a specific person. "You've been lying to me all week. I don't know about what but I can tell, I've always been able to tell with you, you do this thing with your hands—"

The cough came before you could stop it.

It happened the way it happened when you'd let the cold in too far — suddenly, with little warning, too strong to redirect. You turned away from him on instinct, one hand over your mouth, and coughed, and managed it in three seconds that felt considerably longer, and stood very still afterward with your back to him and your hand closed.

The road was very quiet.

"Turn around," he said, behind you. His voice had changed.

"Ajax—"

"Turn around," he said again, and the word had something in it you had only heard from him in very specific circumstances, a command that was not a command but was not quite a request either, the voice of someone who has assessed the situation and determined it requires immediate honesty.

You turned around. You opened your hand.

He looked at your palm. At the petals — two of them, white, small, unmistakable. He looked at them for a long moment with the particular stillness that was his most unguarded tell, the one that meant something had landed that required actual processing rather than reflexive response.

"How long," he said.

"Ajax—"

"How long," he said again, and looked up from your hand to your face, and the quality of his eyes in that moment was something you were going to hold for a long time, something you did not have an adequate description for, something that was Ajax stripped entirely down, the boy who climbed fences and the man who had come back from the Abyss and everything in between, all at once, looking at you.

"Since May," you said.

Something moved through his face. "May," he repeated, and there was something in the word, the way he said it, that made your chest hurt separately from the flowers.

"I've been seeing a physician," you said, quickly. "I have treatments, they've been helping, it's being managed—"

"Managed," he said.

"Managed," you confirmed. "I'm fine."

"You're not fine," he said, and his voice had a roughness in it that wasn't anger, or was anger directed somewhere other than you. "You've been—for six months you've been—and you didn't—" he stopped. He looked away, down the road, jaw tight, and you watched him manage something the way he managed things, from the inside out, with no external evidence of the effort except the quality of his stillness.

"I didn't want it to be a problem," you said.

"It's not a problem," he said, turning back, "it's—you're—" he stopped again, and you saw something in his face that you were not ready to see, something that was making connections you had specifically arranged for him not to make. "Who," he said.

"Ajax."

"Who is it," he said.

"That's not—it doesn't matter who—"

"It matters," he said. "It matters because if someone in this town has—if there's someone who you—" he stopped. He looked at you. And in the looking was something you recognized, some quality of attention that was pulling the pieces together with the same efficiency it applied to everything, and you watched him arrive at something and watched him not say it, watched him decide not to say it, and the space where the not-saying was had a shape you both stood around in silence.

"The surgery," he said, finally. Carefully.

"I'm not having the surgery," you said.

Every muscle in his body went absolutely rigid. "You're not—"

"I'm not having it."

"That's—" he started, and stopped, and started again, and you could see him cycling through several approaches and discarding them. "You understand what happens without it."

"I understand," you said.

"Then you have to—"

"Ajax." You said his name the way Natalya said things when she needed them heard, with weight. "I'm not going to argue with you about this. I've made my decision."

"Your decision is to—" he couldn't finish the sentence. You watched him not finish it, watched his jaw tighten, watched him look away from you again down the road toward his mother's house, toward the place that was the home of everything that mattered to him. "Tell me why," he said, quietly. "Tell me why you would choose not to—just tell me why."

You looked at him on the road in the grey afternoon. You thought about Katya's office and the glass jar and six months of mornings in Natalya's kitchen. You thought about the surgery and what it removed and what would be left after, the shape of the missing thing, the room described in darkness. You thought about twenty-three years of his mother's tea and Teucer's stories and the amber lights on the porch and Ajax at six years old on the wrong side of a fence telling you that you were going to be friends.

"Because some things are worth what they cost," you said. "That's all. Some things you don't want to be cured of."

He looked at you for a long moment, and the look had that quality from the dinner table, the undefended one, and you received it and held it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would be honest without being the thing you had decided not to say, and you had made your decision about what to keep.

He reached out and took your hand — carefully, the way he handled things he was being careful with — and closed your fingers over the petals still in your palm, and held your closed hand in both of his.

He didn't say anything. You didn't either. The snow was beginning, the way it always began, and the road was quiet, and you stood there with his hands around your closed hand and felt the pressure in your chest and breathed.

He left three days later.

He tried, in those three days, several more times. He came at it from different angles the way he came at most problems, testing for the approach that would work, and he was gentle about it, which was its own kind of difficult, Ajax being gentle, Ajax with all the aggression folded away and something careful in its place. You held your position, each time, and eventually he stopped trying and simply stayed close, which was both easier and harder than the trying.

The morning of his leaving he came to your door before the house was awake.

You opened it and he was standing there in his travel clothes with his bag already on his shoulder, and neither of you said anything for a moment, and then he said:

"Come to breakfast. Natalya wants everyone."

So you went, and had breakfast at that kitchen table for what you understood might be one of the last times, in the way you understood most things you didn't want to understand. Teucer cried, which he always did. Tonia hugged Ajax for a long time. Natalya held him in the doorway with her eyes closed, and you stood in the road because the house felt too full.

He came to you last, the way he always did.

He stood in front of you and looked at you, and you looked back, and the morning was the pale clear blue that came after heavy snow, and his eyes were the color they'd always been, and you thought: I have known this face for twenty-three years. I know every version of it. I know the one at six and the one that came back from the Abyss and the one that laughs at Teucer and the one he makes when he's managing something alone. I know this face better than I know my own.

He stepped forward and pulled you in, and you went, and his arms came around you with the force of someone who was not performing ease, who was simply holding on, and you pressed your face against his shoulder and breathed him in and felt, in your chest, the flowers doing what they did — not painfully, not in that moment, just present, the way they were always present, the way he was always present, two constants that had become indistinguishable.

"Write to me," he said, into your hair.

"I always do," you said.

He pulled back and looked at you, and the look had everything in it, all twenty-three years, and whatever else was underneath the years that neither of you had named, that lived in the not-saying, in the space you'd built around it together without discussing the architecture.

"Don't make any decisions while I'm gone," he said, and the sentence meant several things and you both knew which one he meant underneath the others.

"Ajax," you said.

"I'm serious," he said. "Just—wait. For me. Can you do that."

You looked at him. You thought about what waiting meant, what it would cost, what the physician had said about timelines and progression, and you thought about what the alternative was, the surgery and its clean mechanical removal, and you thought about standing next to Ajax having had it done, for the rest of your life, knowing.

"I'll write to you," you said, which was not the answer he asked for and both of you knew it.

His jaw tightened. He nodded, once, the controlled kind.

"Go," you said. "Teucer's going to start crying again."

He went. He picked up his bag and walked down the road and you watched him until the road turned, the same road it had always been, the road you had walked together more times than either of you had counted, and then he was gone, and the morning was very quiet around you.

Behind you, in the doorway, Natalya's hand found your shoulder.

You stood in the cold and breathed and felt the flowers and thought: this is what it costs. You had done the accounting honestly, you thought. You had looked at the cost and looked at the alternative and made the choice with both eyes open, and it was not a choice made from hopelessness or drama or some romantic notion borrowed from those folk songs. It was simpler than that. It was: this love has been the main fact of your life for twenty-three years. It is woven into Teucer's voice and Natalya's kitchen and the amber lights on the porch and the road you have walked every morning since you were six years old. The surgery removes the source. The source is not separate from the rest of it. The source is the thing the rest grew from.

You could not cut out the root without losing the tree.

That was all. That was the whole accounting.

The winter deepens the way Morepesok winters deepened, with patience and thoroughness, adding to itself daily until the fence posts disappeared and the road was a matter of faith rather than visibility. You went to Natalya's every morning, as you had promised. You ate at her table and helped with the children and sat in the kitchen while she moved around it with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had kept things running through harder winters than this one.

She did not push you again about the surgery. She kept your secret with the same careful strength she kept everything — fully, without burdening you with evidence of the effort.

You wrote to Ajax, as you always did, letters about the small weather of Morepesok, the children's doings, the village news, the kind of letter you had always written him full of the texture of home. He wrote back, as he always did, from wherever the commission had taken him. His letters arrived intermittently, sometimes weeks apart, sometimes two in the same week — the rhythms of a soldier's post, shaped by access rather than intention. You read them at the kitchen table and felt, reading them, the simultaneous and contradictory sensations of his presence and his absence.

In January, between his letters, Katya came to see you.

She sat across from you in your kitchen, which felt different from her office, more ordinary, more confronting in its ordinariness, and she reviewed what she'd been tracking through your reports and told you, in her even professional voice, what you had mostly already understood.

"The progression is faster than I projected," she said. "The cold isn't helping. I want to adjust the treatment schedule."

"Does it matter," you said, not unkindly.

She looked at you. "The treatments buy time," she said. "Time is not meaningless."

"No," you agreed. "It isn't."

She adjusted the treatments and left, and you sat at your kitchen table for a while afterward looking at the snow outside your window, which was doing what it had been doing since October, its patient continuous work. You thought about time. About what you'd done with the time you'd had and what was left in the time remaining.

You thought about Ajax's face on the road, his hands closing your fingers over the petals. You thought about twenty-three years of his voice through a wall and his laugh carrying from his mother's house to yours and the specific, irreplaceable quality of being known by someone who had known you since before you were finished becoming yourself.

You thought: it was enough. It was the main thing and it was enough.

His letter in February was longer than usual.

It arrived on a Thursday and you brought it to Natalya's kitchen to read, because Natalya's kitchen was where things arrived, where things were received, where the important matters of your life had always been processed. Natalya sat across from you with her own tea and did not pretend not to watch your face while you read.

He wrote about the commission, in the careful vague terms he always used, the language of someone long practiced in writing across channels that couldn't be fully trusted. He wrote about Teucer's last letter and how it had made him laugh on a night he'd needed something to make him laugh. He wrote about a meal he'd had somewhere that reminded him, for reasons he couldn't entirely explain, of home.

And then, at the bottom of the letter, in handwriting that was slightly different from the rest — smaller, more deliberate, the handwriting of someone who had started several sentences and crossed them out:

I keep thinking about the road. Before I left. I keep running the accounting on what I should have said and I can't find an ending to it that works. I know you made your decision. I know what you told me about cost and worth. I know better than anyone that you make decisions with your whole self and you don't unmake them.

But I want you to know that every version of my life I think worth having has you in it. That isn't me trying to change your mind. I know I can't. It's just something I couldn't keep not saying.

Stay warm. Write back. I'll be home in spring.

You read that paragraph twice. Three times. You sat at Natalya's kitchen table with the letter in your hands and the snow falling outside and felt something in your chest that was separate from the flowers and also not separate from the flowers, something that lived in the intersection of both, in the place where the love and the cost of the love were the same thing.

You thought: spring.

You thought, carefully, practically, looking at February through the window with the honest eyes of someone who had been making honest accountings for eight months: spring.

Katya had said the treatments bought time. She had not said how much. She had adjusted the schedule in January. She had looked at you in January with the look of someone managing her own professional composure.

You put the letter down. You looked at Natalya, who was looking at her tea.

"He says he'll be home in spring," you said.

"I know," she said, quietly. "He wrote to me as well."

You looked at her. She looked at you. The kitchen was very warm, the way it had always been warm, and outside the snow was doing its Morepesok thing, its patient white erasure of edges, its making everything soft and continuous.

"Natalya," you said.

"Don't," she said, and her voice, for the first time in all of this, was not quite steady. "Don't say the practical thing. Not right now."

"I was going to say—" you stopped. You looked down at the letter. At his handwriting at the bottom, smaller and more deliberate than the rest. "I was going to say that I want to write him back something real. Not the village news. Something real."

She looked at you.

"I've been not-saying it for twenty-three years," you said. "I don't want the last letter I write him to be about the village news."

The kitchen was very quiet. Natalya pressed her lips together, and her eyes were very bright, and she stood up and put the kettle on again because this was what she did when she needed something to do with her hands.

You got out a piece of paper.

You wrote for a long time. You wrote the way you had always wanted to write to him, with the names for things, with the twenty-three years laid out honestly, with the fence and the kitchen and the road and all of it, the whole long geography of what it had been to have him as the main fact of your life. You did not ask him for anything. You did not tell him about the flowers, beyond what he already knew. You simply told him the truth, at last, at length, in the careful way of someone making sure the record is complete, making sure nothing important is left in the not-saying.

You told him that every version of your life you had ever considered worth having also had him in it.

You told him the flowers were worth it. You told him you meant that.

You told him spring was a good season for coming home.

You folded the letter. Natalya, without being asked, provided an envelope. You sealed it and wrote his name on the front, the name he'd had before all the other names, the one that still fit him best in kitchens and on roads, the one that had been the first word in the twenty-three year sentence of your friendship.

Ajax.

What Natalya told him later, when he came home in spring to a house that was one person quieter than it had been in twenty-three years, was this: she went quickly, at the end. She was not in pain. She had her letters, his most recent ones, in her hand. She had asked Natalya to stay, and Natalya had stayed, and in the morning the snow had covered the road completely and the fence posts had disappeared and the world had gone white and still.

She told him you had written a letter. She gave it to him in the kitchen, the one she'd been holding since February, the one she hadn't been able to bring herself to send because sending it had felt like an ending and she had not been ready for the ending and then the ending had come anyway.

He read it at the kitchen table where you had sat for twenty-three years, with his elbows on the wood and his head down, and Natalya stood at the window and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and the kitchen held you the way it had always held you, in the warmth of it, in the smell of tea and something baking, in the twenty-three years of mornings deposited in the walls.

Outside, the snow was finally melting. Spring was coming in the way Morepesok spring came — slowly, with reluctance, the cold giving ground only incrementally, the road appearing again by degrees as the white pulled back. The fence posts emerged from the snow one morning, then another, the field recovering itself gradually, the long buried things rising back up as the season changed.

The amber lights on the porch were still lit. Natalya kept them lit.

Ajax sat at the table for a long time. He read the letter twice. He folded it carefully and held it in both hands and looked at it, and Natalya looked at her window, and the kitchen was quiet, and the snow kept melting in the way it always melted eventually, steadily, without being hurried, giving back what winter had kept in its own time.

Some things, the snow kept until it was ready.

Some things, it gave back changed.

Some things it simply kept.

happy ending &. childe's pov &.

[sebssoulmate]

40’s Bucky makes brain go brrr

[pics/gifs from pinterest]

[bodeckerhedron]

SEBASTIAN STAN as BUCKY BARNES

+ CHRIS EVANS as STEVE ROGERS

➤• CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)

[nervmaup]

[chuuyanakahras]

and one other thing i am DYING AND DESPERATE for mr and mrs smith type fics PLEASE. where are the fics where you are attempting to assassinate your husband who loves you dearly and also attempts assassinating you as a form of foreplay. WHERE are they. i need these fics so expeditiously. and dont forget about black widow!reader hello like thats literally my joy in life where are these fics

[chuuyanakahras]

im js saying nobody and i mean NOBODY understands dana 'scottie' scott like i do scottie u will always be famous ily

[chuuyanakahras]

DAUGHTER OF THE DEMON, THIEF OF... HIS HEART?

dick grayson x al ghul!reader content: fluff, villain reader, purely self indulgent fluff notes: wrote this a while back and just decided to rework and finally post it... hopefully it makes sense LOL masterlist

The first time Nightwing meets you, he doesn't actually see you. He hears a laugh somewhere above him on the fire escape, low and delighted, and by the time he's grappled up to investigate, you're already three buildings over, perched on a ledge eating an apple you very clearly stole from the kitchen he just searched.

"That's evidence," he calls across the gap.

"It was an apple," you call back. "Mostly it was just fruit."

He doesn't catch you that night. He doesn't catch you the next three times either, though you make sure he comes close enough to taste it—a shadow at the edge of his periscope vision, a held door that should have been locked, a warehouse job that gets mysteriously sabotaged from the inside before he even arrives, leaving him standing in the wreckage of a deal that's already fallen apart, no idea who did it, just a black rose tucked into the lock mechanism like a calling card.

He starts looking for the rose before he admits to himself he's looking for it.

The first real conversation happens because you let it. You're sitting on his usual rooftop—the one over the comms relay, the one he thinks nobody else knows about—legs dangling over the edge, when he finally lands behind you instead of catching you mid-escape.

You don't turn around. "You're slower than I expected."

"You're harder to predict than I expected."

"That's the nicest thing a vigilante's ever said to me." You finally glance back, and the smile you give him is unhurried, assessing, the kind of smile that makes him feel like he's the one being cased. "Sable."

"I know who you are."

"Do you," you say, and it isn't a question, it's an invitation, daring him to actually say it.

He doesn't take the bait yet. He crosses the roof instead and sits, a careful three feet of distance between you, escrima sticks still in hand, and you watch him do it with open amusement, like you're cataloguing exactly how long it'll take before that distance disappears.

"You've been in my city for three weeks," he says.

"And you've been thinking about me for three weeks," you say. "I'd call that fair trade."

"I haven't—"

"You checked the warehouse lock for the rose before you checked for prints." You say it lightly, like gossip, not accusation. "I watched you do it. You smiled."

He doesn't have an answer for that, mostly because it's true, and the silence that follows is somehow worse than if he'd argued, because you laugh—soft, low, entirely too pleased with yourself—and lean back on your hands, tilting your face toward the skyline like you've already won something.

He figures out the rest of it himself, three weeks later, hunched over Bruce's files at two in the morning. Your photograph is grainy, badly lit, filed under a section he wishes he hadn't opened. Granddaughter, the file says. He sits with it long enough that the cave's blue light starts to feel like an accusation.

The next time you appear, he's ready for a fight. You're not interested in giving him one.

You're draped over the hood of his bike when he finds you, parked outside a charity gala he'd left early, ankles crossed, spinning one of his own escrima sticks between your fingers like you'd lifted it off him hours ago and only now decided to make it obvious.

"You went through League records," you say, before he can start. "I can tell. You've got the face."

"What face."

"The one where you're deciding whether to arrest me or interrogate me, and you haven't picked yet." You toss the escrima stick. He catches it on reflex, and the motion brings him three steps closer than he meant to stand. "For what it's worth, I'd find arresting me a lot more interesting than you're expecting."

"You killed a man in front of me."

"I did." No flinch, no defensiveness — just fact, delivered with the same ease as everything else you say. "He had it coming. I'm not going to perform guilt about it to make you more comfortable, Nightwing. That's not a service I offer."

He should be angrier than he is. He knows this, distantly, the way you know a held breath should eventually hurt — but you're close enough now that he can see the faint scar along your jaw, the steel under the sandalwood, and something about the way you're watching him, daring him to make this difficult, makes the anger harder to hold onto than it should be.

You reach out and straighten his collar, unhurried, like you have every right to.

"There," you say. "Better. Can't have Gotham's golden boy looking rumpled when he finally decides to chase me properly."

You're gone before he can respond — over the edge of the parking structure, gone into the dark, and he stands there for a long moment with his pulse doing something he doesn't have a clean name for.

After that, you make a habit of being almost caught.

You leave your knives in places he'll find them — embedded in a board, a wall, once memorably the underside of his own kitchen table, which means you'd been in his apartment, which means his security is exactly as breakable as you'd implied. You leave notes that aren't notes, just small evidence of presence: a window cracked that should be locked, his coffee already made and still warm, a single black rose on his nightstand sitting on top of a file he definitely didn't leave open.

He starts leaving the window unlocked on purpose. He tells himself it's strategic.

The night it finally breaks is unremarkable in every way except that you're already in his apartment when he gets home, sitting cross-legged on his counter, eating directly out of his takeout container with his own fork, utterly unbothered by his arrival.

"You really have to stop doing this."

"You really have to stop not changing your locks." You hold up a piece of pad thai on the fork, an offering, and when he doesn't immediately move toward it, you eat it yourself with a shrug that says your loss. "I left the door unlocked on the way out last time, you know. Just to see if you'd notice."

"I noticed."

"And you didn't fix it."

He doesn't answer that. He pulls his mask off instead, drops it on the counter, and crosses the kitchen toward you with none of the careful distance from the rooftop weeks ago, and you watch him do it with your chin tilted up, daring, unbothered, right up until he's close enough that your knees brush his hip where you're perched on the counter.

"You going to arrest me now?" you ask. Light. Testing.

"Already decided against it. Three weeks ago."

"How sentimental."

He reaches past you — not for you, not yet, just for the takeout container behind you — and the motion brings his arm against your waist, brief, deliberate, and he feels rather than sees the way your breath catches, the first unguarded thing you've let him see since the rooftop. You recover fast. You always do. But not fast enough that he misses it.

"You're doing that on purpose," you say.

"Learned from the best."

You laugh — real, surprised out of you — and that's the moment he finally closes the distance, no declarations, no admissions, just his hand sliding along your jaw the way you'd straightened his collar weeks before, an answer to a question neither of you had bothered to ask out loud. You meet him halfway, fork abandoned somewhere on the counter, your hand fisting in his shirt not from hesitation but from the opposite — like you'd been waiting for exactly this and had simply decided, characteristically, to make him work for it first.

When you finally pull back, you're both breathing harder than the moment should warrant, and you recover first, of course you do, tracing one finger down the front of his shirt with deliberate, unhurried interest.

"Took you long enough," you murmur.

"You hid knives in my kitchen table."

"And you kept the rose." Your eyes flick up to his, all mischief, no apology. "I think that makes us even."

He laughs — low, disbelieving, the sound of a man who came home expecting an empty apartment and got something far more complicated instead — and pulls you off the counter properly, your legs wrapping around his waist with the easy confidence of someone who's been waiting for an excuse, your laugh muffled against his neck as he carries you toward the rest of the apartment without either of you bothering to discuss where this is going.

Outside, Gotham keeps its usual indifferent chaos going without either of you. For once, neither of you is in any particular hurry to go fix it.

requests are open!

[chuuyanakahras]

i legit have no idea how this site works bro i just spent 20 mins trying to find the followers page am i #unc

[chuuyanakahras]

hiiii your xiao content is so sweet ❤️ i love him sm

sorry to #intrude but could i maybe request xiao comforting an EXTREMELY stressed reader? life’s been kicking my ass i need him. tysm ❤️

lantern light, low burning

xiao x reader content: hurt/comfort notes: so im actually so horrible im so sorry?? i dont know how tumblr works so im seeing this literally like a full year late.... i get u tho im also incredibly stressed rn so uh hopefully this is still okay sob masterlist

The exhaustion does not arrive like a wave tonight—it arrives like sediment, the slow accumulation of a hundred small disturbances settling at the bottom of something that used to hold itself together. You've been at the desk for hours, the candle burned low enough that wax has pooled and hardened in uneven rings, and at some point you simply stop. Stop reading, stop writing, stop pretending the words on the page mean anything coherent. You let your forehead drop against your folded arms and stay there, breathing in the smell of old parchment and melted wax, feeling the specific exhaustion of someone who has been performing competence for so long they've forgotten what the alternative feels like.

You don't hear the window. You never do.

But you feel the air change—a faint shift in pressure, the way a room responds to something ancient entering it—and when you lift your head he's already there, perched in the windowsill with one knee drawn up, watching you with that flat unreadable patience that used to unsettle you and now feels like the only steady thing in a week that hasn't given you anything to hold onto.

"You've been sitting like that for an hour," he says.

"Have I."

"You have."

"I didn't notice."

"I know," he says, and there's something underneath the words, some current of worry he won't name directly because naming it would mean acknowledging how closely he's been watching, how long he's been perched out there in the cold dark studying the shape of your exhaustion through glass before deciding to come inside.

He drops down from the sill without sound, the way he does everything, all that violent power folded into something quiet and contained, and crosses the room toward you. You expect him to sit across from you, the way he sometimes does when he's working through what to say. Instead he stops beside your chair, and after a moment of visible deliberation—Xiao does not do casual touch easily, every gesture considered before it's offered—his hand settles against the back of your neck, thumb pressing slow circles into muscle gone rigid with tension you hadn't realized you were carrying.

You make a small sound, something between relief and complaint, and let your eyes close.

"You're tense everywhere," he says, like an accusation.

"I'm aware."

"Your shoulders are by your ears."

"Xiao."

"I'm simply stating the facts."

But his hand doesn't stop. It moves with unexpected care along the line of your shoulder, pressing into the knots gathered there with the kind of precision that suggests he's catalogued the geography of your body's stress responses the way he's catalogued the terrain of every mountain pass he's ever guarded—thoroughly, instinctively, without ever admitting he's done so. You lean into the touch without deciding to, tilting your head until it rests against his forearm, and for a long moment neither of you says anything at all. The candle gutters. Somewhere outside, the wind moves through Liyue's eaves with a sound like something exhaling.

"I had a bad week," you finally say, because the silence has gone soft enough to hold the confession.

"I know."

"You don't have to keep saying you know things."

"I would say it less if it weren't true."

You laugh, a small broken thing, more exhale than sound, and he pauses his hand just long enough to register the sound before resuming, more careful now, as though your laughter were something fragile he didn't want to disturb.

"I don't even know how to explain it," you continue, eyes still closed, voice thinning toward something rawer than you intended. "Nothing went catastrophically wrong. It was just—everything, all at once, none of it large enough to justify how heavy it felt. Does that make sense?"

"It makes sense," he says, and there's something different in his voice now, something lower, older. "Grief doesn't always come from catastrophe. Sometimes it's accumulation. Small weights, stacked carefully enough that no single one seems worth mentioning, until you're carrying something unbearable made entirely of things that individually weren't."

You open your eyes and look up at him. He isn't looking at you—his gaze has drifted toward the window, toward the dark shapes of mountains he's spent six hundred years standing watch over, and you understand without him saying it that he isn't speaking hypothetically. Xiao knows weight. Xiao has spent centuries being weight, has measured his own existence in karmic debt accumulated one small necessary cruelty at a time, has carried more than anyone should ever be asked to carry without once setting it down.

"You'd know," you say quietly.

"I would," he agrees, and something tightens at the corner of his jaw before releasing. "Which is why I'm telling you—you don't have to wait until it's catastrophic to let someone help carry it."

You reach up and find his free hand where it rests against the back of your chair, fingers curling around his with the easy familiarity of centuries you don't yet have between you, though it feels, in moments like this, as though you might. His hand goes still beneath yours, the way it always does, some part of him still faintly disbelieving that you keep choosing to do this, to reach for him without hesitation, without flinching from what he is.

"Come here," he says, and it isn't a question.

He guides you up from the chair with a hand at your elbow, steady, certain, and leads you the short distance to the low cushions by the window where you sometimes sit together watching the lanterns drift over the harbor. He sits first, back against the wall, and after a moment's hesitation—because even now, after everything, some part of you still waits to be sure the invitation is real—you settle yourself against his chest, his arm coming around you with a careful, deliberate weight, as though he's still relearning, every time, how to hold something without breaking it.

His chin finds the top of your head. You feel more than hear the breath he releases.

"You smell like candle smoke and ink," he says, after a while, his voice low enough to feel like vibration against your skull more than sound.

"That's not exactly romantic."

"I wasn't trying to be romantic. I was making an observation."

"You're terrible at this."

"I'm aware," he says, and you can feel the ghost of something almost like amusement in the way his chest moves beneath your cheek. "You'll have to settle for honest instead."

You settle. You always settle, with him, into something that doesn't ask you to perform ease you don't feel, doesn't require you to narrate your exhaustion into something palatable. His fingers find the ends of your hair and begin, slowly, methodically, working through the small tangles there, the same patient focus he brings to sharpening Primordial Jade Winged-Spear, the same care he brings to everything fragile enough to require it.

"I keep thinking I should be handling all of this better," you admit, into the quiet. "Everyone else seems to manage."

"Everyone else is lying to you, or lying to themselves," he says, without hesitation. "There is no version of carrying weight that doesn't eventually bend something. I would know."

"That's not comforting."

"I'm not finished," he says, and his hand stills against your hair, settling instead at the curve of your shoulder, thumb tracing slow absent patterns against your collarbone. "What I mean is—bending isn't failure. I bent for six hundred years and I am still here. Still standing. Still capable of this." His arm tightens, fractionally, around you. "You are allowed to bend. You are not required to break simply because the weight is heavy."

You turn your face into his chest, breathing in the particular scent of him—something like mountain wind and old parchment and faintly, beneath it, the green tea he drinks too much of when he thinks no one's counting—and feel something in your chest finally, finally loosen. Not solved. Not fixed. Just loosened, the way a held breath finally releases, the way a clenched hand finally opens.

"Stay," you say, quiet, almost embarrassed by how much you need it.

"I wasn't planning on leaving," he says, immediate, certain, no hesitation at all in it. "I told you. You don't have to hold it all tonight. I'll keep watch over what's left."

"You say that like it's simple."

"It is simple," he says. "I've spent centuries standing guard over things infinitely less important than this. You, asking me to stay—that's not a burden, little one. That's the easiest thing anyone's asked of me in six hundred years."

The endearment lands somewhere soft and unguarded in you, and you feel your eyes go warm and stinging, the exhaustion of the week finally finding an exit it's been searching for since morning. You don't sob. It isn't dramatic. It's just a few tears, slow and silent, slipping free while his hand moves steady circles against your back, while his chin rests against your hair, while outside the lanterns continue their slow drift over a harbor that has stood for centuries and will likely stand for centuries more, indifferent and beautiful and entirely unbothered by the small private collapse happening in this room.

"I've got you," he says, once, quietly, into the dark.

And for the first time in days, you believe it enough to let yourself rest.

You don't know how long you stay like that—folded into him, his heartbeat slow and steady beneath your ear, the candle finally guttering out somewhere behind you and leaving the room lit only by moonlight and the faint glow of distant lanterns. Time moves strangely around Xiao. It always has. He exists slightly outside its usual current, six hundred years of accumulated patience giving him a stillness that makes minutes feel longer and somehow gentler, and you let yourself drift in that stillness without trying to measure it.

At some point his hand stops moving against your hair, not from inattention but from something quieter—you realize, when you finally tilt your head to look up at him, that he's simply watching you. Not with concern anymore, not entirely. Something softer than that. Something he doesn't often let surface, careful as he is about armor, about distance, about the centuries of instinct telling him that wanting things, keeping things, loving things, only ever ends in losing them.

"What?" you ask, voice rough with the remnants of crying.

"Nothing," he says, which is a lie, and you both know it's a lie, and for once he doesn't try particularly hard to make it convincing.

"Xiao."

"I'm only thinking that you look less like you're carrying the weight of Teyvat than you did an hour ago," he says finally, reluctant, like the admission costs him something. "I prefer you like this."

"Tear-stained and pathetic?"

"Soft," he corrects, with more conviction than the word seems to warrant from someone who uses so few of them. "You're allowed to be soft around me. I won't think less of you for it. I think—" he pauses, jaw tightening slightly, the particular discomfort of a man unused to articulating tenderness, "—I think it might be the only time I see you as you actually are, underneath everything you carry for everyone else."

You don't have a response for that. You're not sure one exists. So instead you simply press closer, tucking yourself more fully against him, and feel his arm tighten in response, an answer offered in pressure rather than words, which has always been more his language anyway.

The candle is gone now. The room exists in blue-grey moonlight, the lanterns of Liyue glowing faint and distant through the window, and somewhere in the stillness you feel your breathing finally even out, your shoulders finally drop from where they've lived by your ears for days, your mind finally quiet enough to simply exist in a body that is, for the first time in a long while, not bracing for the next demand.

"Thank you," you murmur, half-asleep already, the words slurring slightly with exhaustion finally allowed to be exhaustion instead of something to push through.

"You don't need to thank me for this," he says, low, almost rough. "Just rest. I'll still be here when you wake."

And he is. Through the slow turning of the night, through the lanterns burning down to embers and the moon shifting position across the floor, through whatever small movements you make in sleep that have him adjusting his arm without waking you—he stays, unmoving, immovable, a yaksha who has spent six centuries learning that vigilance over something this fragile, this human, this entirely undeserving of the violence the world keeps offering it, is not a burden at all.

It's the easiest thing he's ever done.

requests are open!

[chuuyanakahras]

whispers of the deep

xiao x siren!reader content: when a siren and an adepti cross paths fluff? somewhat angst but not really? reader is a troll masterlist

The first time you meet Xiao, it is during a storm violent enough to drive ships back toward harbor and send fishermen cursing toward the shore with saltwater dripping from their clothes. You had always loved storms; loved the way the sea seemed to shrug off every soft thing mortals insisted on calling it and become, for a few brief hours, what it truly was. There had always been honesty in rough waters. The ocean was not cruel, no matter how often humans gave it that name, and it was not kind either. It simply was. It consumed and nurtured with the same indifference, and perhaps that was why you had never understood mortals particularly well. You had been resting beneath the surface, drifting lazily through dark currents and listening to whale-song somewhere far beneath you, when you felt something old standing at the shore. Not heard—felt. Something powerful enough that even through layers of sea and rain, your instincts stirred with recognition. Curious, you rose slowly through the water, emerging beneath a sky heavy with clouds and silver rain, and found a young adeptus standing on the cliffs overlooking the sea with a spear already in hand.

Young, of course, was relative. Mortals would never have called him that. Mortals would have looked at him and seen an immortal creature untouched by time, something ancient and untouchable and distant from themselves. But you had lived through wars older than their kingdoms, had watched gods rise and fall and landscapes carve themselves into new shapes beneath centuries of wind and tide. To you, there was something unmistakably young about him. Not in his face, nor in his power, but in the way conviction sat so fiercely inside him, untempered and absolute. His eyes found you immediately and narrowed, and without greeting, without hesitation, without so much as asking your name, he said:

"Stop killing humans."

You remember staring at him for several long moments afterward, not because you had not heard him, but because your mind genuinely struggled to process what had just happened. Rain slid down your skin and gathered at your jaw before falling back into the sea, and eventually you asked, with complete sincerity:

"...What?"

The expression on his face did not change in the slightest.

"Stop attacking humans," he repeated, with all the certainty of someone stating an obvious truth, and for a second you simply looked at him before laughter burst from you so suddenly you nearly slipped back beneath the water entirely. It was absurd. Entirely absurd. You had expected threats, perhaps violence, perhaps accusations or demands or grand declarations about justice and morality, but there was something almost unbelievable about the simplicity of it. He had walked to the edge of an ocean and asked it not to be an ocean anymore.

You spent the next several minutes tormenting him for your own entertainment. You asked whether he walked into forests and demanded predators stop hunting, whether he intended to lecture every shark and wolf and hawk in Teyvat next, whether he planned on throwing himself into the sea to physically prevent you from feeding if you decided not to listen. The more serious he became, the more delighted you grew, until eventually, after watching irritation gather steadily in his expression, you leaned forward slightly and smiled at him.

"And if I get hungry?" you asked sweetly. "Will you let me eat you instead?"

You had expected anger. Expected threats. Expected some sharp retort. Instead he simply stared at you for a long moment before turning around and walking away entirely, leaving you blinking after him in disbelief before dissolving into laughter hard enough to send ripples through the surrounding waves.

You think, later, that perhaps it should have ended there. Immortal lives crossed paths often enough, and there had been countless people you had known briefly before losing them to time or war or simple distance. Yet somehow he kept returning. At first your conversations remained practical, almost cold in their simplicity. You warned him of dangerous currents and disturbances beneath southern waters; he warned you of monsters in the mountains and remnants of old gods stirring where they should not have been. They were short exchanges spoken out of convenience more than anything else, two ancient creatures sharing information because doing so was useful. But centuries are strange things, and relationships built over centuries do not change suddenly. There was never a moment where you realized you had become friends. There was no grand revelation waiting for you one day. There was simply Xiao sitting beside you on the shoreline longer than usual one evening, staring out toward distant lanterns floating over Liyue Harbor before quietly saying:

"I remember when none of that was there."

You remember turning to look at him then. Really look at him. Moonlight had scattered itself over the sea in broken pieces, and for a moment his expression had softened into something almost distant.

"...I remember too," you had said quietly.

And perhaps that had been the first truly important thing between you, because no mortal could have understood what he meant. No mortal could understand remembering landscapes before they became landscapes, remembering old gods and old wars and old names worn away by time until nothing remained of them. But you understood. You remembered too. Somewhere after that your conversations stopped feeling like conversations between strangers and started feeling like something else entirely.

The trinkets began so quietly that neither of you ever agreed on who had started it, and you suspect now that this was deliberate—that some unspoken rule had decided early on that naming the thing would ruin it. The first was a pearl. You had found it lodged in the ribs of a sunken ship, half-buried in silt that had probably been settling there since before Liyue had a name worth remembering, and when you held it to the light it caught a strange grey-green color that reminded you, absurdly, of the particular shade his eyes turned when he was trying very hard not to look interested in something. You did not think about it for long. You simply pocketed it, found him sometime later sitting on a rock with his spear across his knees like he expected the sky itself to attack him, and dropped it into his palm without explanation.

He looked at it. Looked at you. Looked at it again.

"What is this for?"

"Nothing," you said. "I was bored and it reminded me of you. That's all."

He turned the pearl over in his fingers for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind his expression, and then—without any further comment—closed his hand around it and put it away. You did not see it again for years, and you told yourself you had simply forgotten about it, the way you told yourself many things during that century.

Several weeks later he returned with a small carved bird, wings caught mid-motion, the wood worn smooth in places as though he had spent considerable time turning it over in his hands before deciding it was acceptable. He set it down beside you on the rocks with the elaborate casualness of someone who had rehearsed the gesture and was now furious at himself for rehearsing it.

"I happened to pass a market," he said, not looking at you. "It was there."

"You happened to pass a market," you repeated, "and a wooden bird happened to follow you home."

"It is not significant."

"Of course not."

"I am only telling you because you would have asked otherwise."

"I wasn't going to ask anything."

"You were already opening your mouth."

You had, in fact, already been opening your mouth, and the indignation on his face when you laughed at having been caught was worth every second of it. He looked, for one brief moment, genuinely offended—the particular offense of someone who has done something soft and been immediately punished for it with delight—and you had to physically restrain yourself from telling him how endearing he looked when flustered, mostly because you suspected it would end the bird-giving permanently.

After that it simply became a habit neither of you acknowledged as a habit. You brought him things from the ocean floor—sea glass worn smooth by decades of tide, shells with strange iridescent insides, a polished black stone you'd found wedged beneath an old anchor that you thought looked like something out of the deep trenches where even you rarely went. He brought you things from the mountains—wildflowers that wilted before you could press them, small carved figures from villages whose names you never quite caught, an old coin once from a kingdom that no longer existed, which he presented to you with the gravity of someone handing over a relic of considerable importance.

"Where did you even find this," you asked, turning the coin over.

"Robbed a tomb," he said.

You stared at him.

"I am joking," he added, after a pause too long to be reassuring.

"Xiao."

"It was already open."

You did not get a clearer answer than that, not that day or any day after, and you decided eventually that you preferred it as a mystery. The shelf in whatever dwelling you kept at the time slowly filled with these small offerings—stones beside carvings, shells beside coins, the pearl eventually reappearing on his side of things tucked into a pouch he thought you didn't know about—and neither of you ever called it anything. You noticed, somewhere along the way, that you had begun choosing things specifically because you thought he would like them, rather than because they simply reminded you of him. You noticed, too, that he had stopped pretending the things he brought you were incidental, though he never said so directly. He simply stopped performing the casualness, and one day handed you a small bundle of qingxin flowers without any preamble at all, watching your face carefully as though gauging whether the gesture had been too much.

It had not been too much. You only wished, looking back, that you had told him so at the time instead of simply tucking the flowers behind your ear and changing the subject, the way you did with anything that threatened to become too sincere too quickly.

Years later, when you finally decided to take human form and live among mortals for a while, you told yourself it had been curiosity that drove you toward Liyue Harbor. Humans had changed so much, after all. They had become clever in ways they once had not been. Their cities had grown larger and brighter and louder. They fascinated you. It had absolutely nothing to do with Xiao spending more time there. Absolutely nothing. You repeated this to yourself while standing in the middle of the harbor feeling utterly overwhelmed by noise and movement and warmth and people brushing against your shoulders every few seconds. You were considering whether dramatically throwing yourself back into the ocean would be excessive when Xiao found you standing there looking vaguely murderous.

His eyes moved slowly over you. Paused. Moved back up again.

"...You look strange."

You stared at him for several seconds.

"That was unbelievably rude," you said, very slowly.

"I meant it as an observation."

"It was an insult dressed up as an observation."

"You have two legs now. I was adjusting."

"You could have adjusted silently."

He opened his mouth, seemed to reconsider whatever he had been about to say, and instead settled on a look that suggested he believed himself to be the wronged party in this exchange, which only made the whole thing funnier. The horrified realization that crossed his face minutes later, once he understood exactly how badly that comment had landed, remained one of your favorite memories for centuries—up there with the wooden bird and the tomb coin and the day he discovered, to his great and lasting dismay, that human food had a tendency to stain.

The assumptions from others began not long after that. You thought they were delightful. Xiao thought they were baffling. Shopkeepers smiled knowingly whenever the two of you entered together; strangers looked at you both with amusement hidden in their expressions; a tea vendor once asked, with no small amount of mischief, how long the two of you had been courting, and watched with open glee as Xiao went rigid trying to formulate an answer to a question that had never occurred to him as a question. The worst of it—the best of it, depending on which of you was asked—came from a bakery owner who pressed a couples' discount on you both without waiting to be corrected, cheerfully referring to Xiao as your husband as though the matter were already settled.

"Husband?" Xiao repeated, as though the word itself required translation.

You did not give him the chance to recover. You grabbed his hand, thanked the woman with entirely too much enthusiasm, and felt him go completely still beside you—the particular stillness of a man encountering a disaster he did not have the tools to address. He stared down at your intertwined hands as though they belonged to someone else entirely, and you spent the remainder of the afternoon refusing to let go, partly to torment him and partly, you admitted only to yourself, because his hand was warmer than you expected and you found you did not especially want to give that up.

He did not pull away. You noticed that, too, and filed it away with everything else you weren't yet ready to examine.

The problem, you would realize much later, was that somewhere along the way it stopped being a joke. Somewhere between centuries of shared conversations and exchanged gifts and familiar footsteps beside you, his hand in yours had begun feeling natural. Somewhere along the way your eyes had started seeking him out automatically in crowded places, picking his stillness out of a sea of motion before you had even consciously decided to look. Somewhere along the way Xiao had become the one constant thing in your life, more permanent than tides, more permanent than the harbor lanterns or the mountains or your own restless wandering. After thousands of years spent watching everything else change, that should have terrified you more than it did.

You only realized the full depth of it in the Chasm, when someone told you Xiao was gone and the world seemed to narrow with sudden terrible clarity around those words. You had lived through wars and destruction and grief beyond counting; you had buried people and watched kingdoms disappear beneath history; you had thought yourself long accustomed to loss. Yet none of it prepared you for the possibility of losing him. Nothing prepared you for seeing him fall, or for the unbearable relief that followed when he was caught before disappearing forever. You barely remembered reaching him afterward. You only remembered pulling him into your arms and holding him with enough force that it almost hurt, remembered your hands shaking against his back and your voice breaking as you called him an idiot over and over again because anything else felt impossible.

Very slowly, almost hesitantly, his arms had lifted around you in return.

"I thought I would never see you again," he said quietly, his forehead resting against your shoulder.

Only then did you understand that perhaps you had not been the only one waiting all those years.

[lulugotd1zzy]

[chuuyanakahras]

i love patrick bateman he is genuinely the greatest comedian ever

[chuuyanakahras]

Even if time takes you

Xiao never understood why mortals feared time.

He had seen centuries rise and rot. Dynasties crumble into dust, oceans swallow cities, names lost to echoes. Time was just another curse to outlast. Another enemy to endure.

Until you.

You, who made the years mean something.

You, who made now feel precious.

He didn’t fall in love all at once — not Xiao. Love for him was a slow erosion, a quiet breaking. A steady hum of presence he could not banish, no matter how far he walked.

You were the first to reach for him without fear.

The first to look him in the eyes and not flinch at the remnants of karma flickering gold beneath his lashes.

You asked him once, half-teasing,

“Do you ever stop frowning?”

And he’d blinked, startled — not because of your words, but because no one had spoken to him like that in hundreds of years.

The years that followed passed softly, almost unnoticed.

He learned to stay a little longer each time.

At first, just until dawn. Then until breakfast. Then until the next evening.

Eventually, he stopped leaving altogether.

You’d cook him things he didn’t need to eat — small, simple meals. Stir-fried vegetables, warm broth, tea that always steamed too long because you’d forget it while talking.

He’d sit across from you and listen. He rarely spoke, but his silence softened over the years — became attentive instead of distant.

There was the winter you fell ill, coughing so hard it rattled your ribs. He sat by the bed for three nights straight, refusing to move, convinced if he left the room for even a moment you’d vanish. You didn’t die. You just woke up, tired, and said,

“Xiao, if you stare at me any harder, I’m going to haunt you early.”

He didn’t smile, but the breath he exhaled was shaky and almost human.

There was the spring you danced barefoot in the rain, laughing when he frowned and called it foolish. He didn’t join you. He stood under the eaves, arms crossed — but his eyes never left you, the edges of his mouth twitching like a muscle relearning movement.

There was the midsummer night you fell asleep against his shoulder, and he found himself tracing idle shapes into your palm, just to remind himself you were real.

Time, though, does what it always does.

It began with your hair — a silver thread here, then another.

Then the creases at the corners of your eyes, deepening with every year of laughter.

Then the mornings when your joints hurt, and he had to help you tie your sash.

You always caught his worry before he could hide it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you’d murmur, thumb brushing the furrow of his brow. “This is supposed to happen.”

But Xiao, who had lived long enough to forget beginnings and endings, couldn’t comprehend supposed to.

Each wrinkle, each tremor, each sigh of fatigue — they were all tiny betrayals of the world he had come to know through you.

One day, you asked him to walk with you to the mountain’s edge, where the clouds thinned and the view stretched for miles. You leaned against him, breath light but uneven.

“Look,” you whispered, “I want to see this one more time.”

He didn’t understand what this meant until much later.

That evening, he carried you home on his back. You laughed, called him overprotective, said you weren’t that fragile yet. But he felt it — the way your heartbeat stuttered against his shoulder, the way you clung to him as if you already knew how little time was left.

When the end came, it was gentle.

You were sitting by the window, watching the sunset bleed over the horizon. He was beside you, silent as always, hand resting over yours.

You turned to him and said quietly,

“Don’t look for me in the next life, Xiao. You’ve spent too long searching for what’s gone.”

He didn’t answer. His throat ached with words he’d never learned how to say.

You smiled once more — small, tired, utterly content — and then you closed your eyes.

The room stayed warm for a while, as if refusing to accept what had happened.

And then, slowly, the warmth faded too.

For a long time after, Xiao didn’t move.

He sat in the same chair. Watched the same sun rise and fall. The tea on the table went cold, untouched. Dust gathered in the corners. The world continued as if you had never existed — but he knew better.

He kept your home as it was. Swept the floors. Repaired the roof when it leaked. It was absurd — the adeptus guardian of Liyue, tending to an empty house. But it gave him something to do.

Sometimes, he swore he heard you in the wind.

Sometimes, he’d turn his head, expecting to see you — smiling, scolding, alive.

But it was always just the rustle of leaves.

Centuries passed.

The house decayed. The glaze lilies grew wild around it. The path to the door was long overgrown.

Xiao still visited.

He never forgot the exact sound of your laughter. The warmth of your hand when it brushed his. The scent of rain in your hair.

You had asked him once, long ago,

“Would you still love me if I got old and forgot things?”

And he had said nothing — not because he didn’t know, but because love wasn’t something he could ever unlearn.

Now, as he stood alone beneath the same sky you once admired, he finally understood what you meant by proof.

The proof of life.

The proof of love.

The proof that even immortality could be made tender by a single mortal lifetime.

He whispered your name once more, not in mourning — but in gratitude.

Because for the first time, eternity didn’t feel like punishment.

It felt like memory.

And memory, he realized, was just another kind of forever.

[chuuyanakahras]

constancy (remnants)

The nights had grown quieter since she was gone. Even the wind seemed to know to keep its distance.

Xiao stood on the balcony of Wangshu Inn, elbows resting on the damp wood, eyes fixed on the marsh below. Dawn hadn’t fully broken yet; the mist hung in folds across the water, softening everything it touched. The first birds were stirring. He watched them without focus, without thought.

The plate beside him was still warm. Almond tofu. Verr Goldet had left it by the door again — not because he’d asked, but because she’d learned that silence didn’t mean refusal. The scent drifted upward, faintly sweet, faintly wrong.

He picked up the spoon, stirred once, and let it rest.

He used to tell her that he didn’t care for sweetness. It was true, at least back then. But she’d always brought it anyway, bowl after bowl, each one uneven — sometimes undercooked, sometimes burnt at the edges, once so firm it nearly bounced. She’d laugh when he grimaced, saying, “That’s the price of divine craftsmanship, Alatus.”

He could still hear her laughter if he let the air go still enough. It had a shape to it, light but not fragile — like glass before it breaks.

The mist shifted below. Xiao drew a slow breath, and the taste of sugar on the air felt suddenly heavy.

He’d found her once — years before the end — sitting by the riverbank where the glaze lilies grew. The light had been strange that evening, all amber and blue. She was barefoot, her shoes beside her, one knee drawn up, the water curling cold around her ankle.

“You’ll catch something,” he’d said.

“Only a view,” she’d replied without looking up. Her hands were wet, glittering faintly as she toyed with a lily petal. “You always worry about the wrong things.”

He didn’t answer. She’d smiled then, half to herself.

The memory was so sharp now that he could see it — the tiny movement of her thumb brushing against her cheek, the faint red mark it left where she’d scratched a mosquito bite. The smallest things, all preserved perfectly in his mind, as if remembering could make her less gone.

The tofu had cooled. He hadn’t taken a bite.

He set the spoon down and leaned forward, pressing his forehead lightly against the railing. The wood was cold. Beneath it, he could hear the faint murmur of travelers, muffled laughter, the rattle of dishes. All of it distant, almost unreal.

He wondered when it had happened — when the sound of other lives began to feel like noise.

He hadn’t gone to her last rites. He couldn’t. The mortal monks had said her spirit passed quietly, that she looked peaceful, that she had smiled at the end. As if that meant anything.

He’d heard the news from Cloud Retainer days later. Her tone had been clinical, measured, as though she were cataloging a loss among many.

He hadn’t answered then either. Just turned away, and kept walking until the sky went dark.

The spoon clinked softly as he lifted it again. He stared at the almond tofu for a long time before taking a small bite. It was too sweet.

He swallowed anyway.

He remembered once — she had come to him with a bowl half-spilled from the flight up the mountain, apologizing, laughing. “It’s ruined,” she’d said, breathless. “But maybe you’ll like it better that way.”

He had eaten every bite. She never noticed the way his hands shook.

The horizon was paling now. Threads of gold across the fog. Xiao’s eyes followed them absently. He thought of her hair — the way the wind used to catch it, always slipping free from whatever braid she’d tied it into. Once, during a long march north, a strand had brushed his cheek. He’d almost reached up to touch it, then stopped himself, fingers curling into his palm.

He’d told himself it was nothing. A trick of the wind.

But the warmth of it had stayed all night.

He didn’t know how long he stood there. The bowl sat empty beside him, the mist beginning to lift. A heron cut across the water, white wings catching the light.

He thought about how she’d have described it — something about grace, or stillness, or how even creatures of flight could love the water. She had always said things like that, words too soft for him to hold.

He remembered, suddenly, the last time they spoke.

It had been near the end of the wars, the world half-rebuilt but still full of silence. They were walking down a mountain trail after a meeting with Cloud Retainer. She had been quiet, which was unusual.

“You’re leaving,” he’d said finally.

She’d smiled, but not like before. “Don’t sound so surprised. Even mountains erode.”

He frowned. “That isn’t funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

They’d stopped at a bend where the path opened to the valley. She’d turned toward him, the light slanting across her face. Her eyes looked… different that day. Softer. Or maybe just tired.

“You’ll be fine,” she’d said.

He didn’t answer.

She tilted her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. “You don’t have to keep watching over me, you know.”

He almost told her then — that he didn’t know how not to. That her presence, however fleeting, had been the only thing that made the endless centuries bearable. That every bowl of burnt tofu, every careless laugh, every scolding about rest had given shape to a silence he hadn’t realized was hollow.

Instead, he said, “It’s my duty.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Of course it is.”

That was all.

Now, years later, he realized that might have been the moment she began to fade. Not from the world, but from him.

He exhaled, the breath leaving white in the morning air.

A gust swept through the marsh, cool and clean. He felt it brush against his hair, against the back of his neck, like a hand passing by. Reflexively, he looked up.

The sunlight broke through the mist, scattering across the railing, turning each drop of dew into a tiny mirror.

He didn’t imagine her face there. He’d stopped doing that a long time ago.

But still — he stayed a little longer, watching the light shift, listening to the faint hum of the inn behind him.

If she had been there, she would’ve said something small, something ordinary — that the day smelled like rain, or that the tofu had too much sugar again. He would’ve pretended not to hear, then watched the way her lips curved when she smiled.

He hadn’t told her that he liked the tofu because it was hers. That he never cared whether it was perfect. That he never once thought she was a burden.

He never told her anything, really.

And now, there was no one left to tell.

The wind shifted again. He closed his eyes.

Below, the marsh glimmered with light. The world went on, and Xiao — Xiao endured.

He reached for the empty bowl, turned it once in his hands, and set it aside. The faint scent of almond lingered on his fingers.

He stood there until the sun rose fully — until the mist burned off, until there was nothing left between him and the horizon but the quiet.

Then, finally, he whispered the only truth he had left:

“I remember.”

The word vanished into the wind, soft as breath. No one answered.

But for a moment, he thought he heard her laugh again — faint, distant, almost kind.

[chuuyanakahras]

catching fire

The wars had been raging for so long that even the mountains had grown tired of echoing their sound. Every dawn rose red, and every dusk carried smoke; still, the adepti gathered, bound by duty to a god whose shadow stretched across the world.

Xiao woke before the others. The air was damp with mist, thick with iron. His body ached, though he’d learned not to call it pain—it was simply the weight of staying alive. He sat on the ridge above camp, watching the fog curl over the valley, when he heard your footsteps.

You didn’t try to hide your presence. You never did.

“You didn’t rest,” you said, stopping just short of him.

“I don’t need rest.”

“That’s a lie,” you said, and the wind carried the faint amusement in your voice. “Even demons sleep when they tire.”

He glanced at you then, and the sight of you—your hair still half-loose, streaked faintly with ash; your hands, singed at the edges from channeling flame all night—struck him harder than any blade. You were an adeptus of fire, but you always looked on the verge of burning out. He wondered, not for the first time, how much of you was smoke already.

“Sit,” he said finally, gesturing to the space beside him.

You did, folding your legs beneath you. For a while, you both watched the fog move below, where the remnants of battle glimmered faintly—broken armor, fallen spears, the faint pulse of lingering evil. Xiao could feel the corruption in the air like splinters under his skin.

You didn’t speak again until the sun began to rise. The light touched your cheek first, catching the small, stray hairs that framed your face, gilding them in gold. “When it’s quiet like this,” you said, “I almost believe the war is over.”

He turned his head slightly toward you. “Do you want it to be?”

You exhaled, a sound between a sigh and a laugh. “I want to know who I’d be without it.”

He said nothing, but his eyes softened. You leaned back on your hands, and the faint heat of your aura reached him—a warmth so familiar he could tell where you stood in battle by the way the air changed.

Below, the mist began to thin. The first cries of returning soldiers echoed faintly through the valley.

“Do you ever think about after?” you asked.

“There is no after,” he said. “Only what must be done.”

“Of course you’d say that,” you murmured, half-smiling. “Always the dutiful one.”

He frowned slightly, not out of anger, but out of discomfort. You leaned forward again, glancing at him from the corner of your eye. “Tell me something, Alatus,” you said, using the old name, the one that still felt like a blade in his chest. “When this is all done—if it ever is—what will you do with peace?”

“I don’t know peace.”

“You could learn.”

Your tone was light, but he heard the tremor beneath it. He didn’t answer.

The wind picked up, lifting the loose strands of your hair. One brushed against his cheek, soft as silk, and for the briefest moment, he didn’t move. The strand clung there, trembling in the air between you. Then you reached up, brushing it back behind your ear, and his chest ached at the loss of it.

When you noticed his gaze, you smiled. “You look at me like I’m something fragile.”

“You are,” he said.

“I wield fire.”

He met your eyes. “Even fire burns out.”

Your smile faltered. “Then what are you, if not something that burns?”

“Something that endures.”

The way you looked at him then—steady, bright, a little sad—made him want to take the words back. Enduring, he realized, wasn’t the same as living.

A shout from below broke the moment. Orders being called. Another battle stirring. You stood first, brushing the dirt from your palms, and extended a hand to him. He hesitated before taking it.

Your skin was warm—so warm that he felt it long after he let go.

By noon, the air was on fire again. The enemy descended through the valley in waves, and the adepti met them with wind and flame and fury. Xiao fought at the front, spear flashing, the cry of his victims folding into the storm. Every time he leapt into the air, he felt the pull of your heat somewhere nearby, saw the arcs of red light splitting through the smoke.

Then, suddenly, you weren’t there.

Panic hit him like an old memory. He tore through the chaos until he saw it—the cratered ground, the circle of scorched earth, and you kneeling in the center, hands trembling, eyes half-closed. Fire still rippled around you, eating the corpses of the demons that had nearly overwhelmed you. You’d destroyed them, but the effort had nearly cost you.

He was beside you in an instant, kneeling. “You’ve overextended,” he said sharply. “Foolish.”

You laughed, breathless. “You always scold me after I save you.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“Sure,” you whispered, eyes slipping shut.

He caught you before you fell. Your body was burning, fever-hot, your heartbeat fluttering against his hand like a trapped bird. He pressed his palm against your back, channeling a cool wave of anemo energy to steady you. The smell of smoke clung to you both.

When your breathing eased, you opened your eyes again. “You’re trembling.”

“It’s the heat.”

“You’re lying,” you murmured, a small smile curving your mouth. “You always lie when you care.”

He wanted to deny it, but the sound of your voice—soft, unsteady, still full of light—made denial impossible. He lowered his head, and for a moment, your foreheads touched.

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t anything. Just breath shared between exhaustion and silence. The air between you shimmered with residual flame. He could feel your lashes brush against his skin when you blinked.

“I’m fine, Alatus,” you said quietly.

“I know.”

But he didn’t move.

Your hand rose, finding his wrist. Your thumb brushed the edge of his glove, the motion so small it could have been accidental. “Promise me something,” you said.

“What?”

“When this ends, don’t let it end you too.”

He exhaled, eyes still closed. “If it ends,” he said, “it will take us both.”

You smiled faintly, and that was all. When he opened his eyes again, you were already looking away—toward the valley, where smoke curled up into a sky the color of old wounds.

He followed your gaze. “We should return,” he said.

“In a minute,” you murmured. “I want to watch the world burn a little longer.”

So he stayed. You both did—two silent figures among the ruins, watching the sunlight pierce through the haze. The battle had ended, but the air still smelled of ash and ozone, sharp and alive.

When you stood, he stood with you. You turned to him one last time before descending back into the valley. “Alatus,” you said, voice low. “If the world forgets us, will you remember?”

He looked at you, really looked, until the image of you—your soot-streaked face, your half-burned hair, the tired curve of your smile—was carved into him like a scar. “Yes,” he said. “Even if memory burns.”

You smiled, eyes crinkling faintly at the corners. “Then that’s enough.”

The wind rose, carrying sparks from your sleeve as you walked away. He watched until the smoke swallowed you, until the only thing left was the faint scent of cinder and the echo of your steps.

Later, when the sun fell and the camp grew quiet, Xiao sat again on the ridge. Below, the fires of victory burned low, and he could hear the murmur of sleeping soldiers. He lifted his hand, turning it palm-up, and for an instant he could almost feel it again—the ghost of your warmth, the way your fingers had pressed against his wrist.

He stared at his palm until the night blurred.

If he closed his eyes, he could still hear you laughing through the smoke.

And for a moment—just one—he let himself believe that when morning came, you’d still be there to wake him.

[chuuyanakahras]

ashes, ashes

The nights had grown quieter since the fall. No more hymns from the mountaintops, no more incense curling over the water. Even the winds that swept through Wangshu’s marshes felt different—hollow, as if the land itself had forgotten how to breathe.

Xiao stood at the edge of the cliff, arms crossed loosely over his chest. The air smelled faintly of smoke. He didn’t move until he heard the footsteps—light, hesitant, the same rhythm he’d memorized centuries ago. He could tell it was you long before you spoke.

“You always find the highest place,” you said softly, voice nearly swallowed by the wind.

Xiao didn’t turn. “I was not hiding.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

Your words came with a smile he could hear but not see. You came to stand beside him, the orange glow of your sleeve brushing against the black of his own. When the breeze shifted, a strand of your hair lifted, catching briefly on his shoulder before slipping free. He almost reached for it—almost—but let the motion die before it began.

For a while, you both said nothing. The stars above you blinked faintly, uncertain, like eyes still adjusting to a darkened world.

“You’ve been watching again,” you said finally, without accusation. “The trees still burn where I pass.”

Xiao’s jaw tightened. “You draw attention to yourself.”

“I draw warmth,” you corrected. “There’s a difference.”

He didn’t respond. Your fire had always unnerved him—not for its heat, but for the way it refused to die. When the last wars ended and the other adepti turned to dust, your flames kept flickering, soft and stubborn, a candle left burning in an empty shrine.

He wanted to say that it gave him comfort. Instead, he said nothing, and the silence grew heavy between you.

You leaned forward, elbows resting against your knees. “Do you ever think it’s strange,” you murmured, “that the gods are gone, yet the karma remains?”

He turned toward you then, just slightly. The faint light from your fire—gentle embers that drifted from your hands as you spoke—cast a glow across your face. It caught in your lashes, lit the moisture in your eyes until it shimmered like glass.

“Yes,” he said. “But karma is not divine. It is the residue of what we were.”

“And what are we now?”

His answer came too fast. “Burdened.”

You smiled at that, though it didn’t reach your eyes. A soft wind pressed against your hair, sweeping it across your cheek; a few strands stuck there, catching on the faint sheen of your skin. Without thinking, Xiao reached forward and brushed them away. His fingertips hovered just above your face, not touching—then, barely, they grazed your cheekbone.

The warmth of you startled him. It wasn’t fire-hot; it was human-warm, the kind that made his pulse stutter, the kind that didn’t belong to immortals.

You looked up at him, eyes wet but not yet crying. “You still flinch when you touch me,” you said, and your voice was quiet enough that he could almost pretend it was the wind.

“I don’t—”

“You do.” You smiled again, faint and patient. “It’s all right. I flinch too.”

He drew his hand back, flexing it once before folding it behind him. The silence stretched, brittle as glass.

“I went to the ruins,” you said after a while. “Where Guizhong’s bell used to stand. The stones are cold now. I thought maybe if I lit something—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted. “You’ll draw spirits.”

You gave a soft laugh. “Let them come. I’m tired of being the only one who remembers.”

That stopped him. He looked at you fully this time, eyes narrowing as though you’d said something dangerous. Maybe you had. The wind shifted again, carrying the scent of ash. He realized then that the faint glow around you wasn’t just your aura—it was real, tiny embers drifting off your skin, fading before they hit the ground.

“You’re burning yourself,” he said, a sharpness creeping into his voice.

“I’m trying to keep warm,” you replied. The words were simple, but they made his chest tighten.

He remembered, suddenly, how you used to sit by the riverside after battle, your flames dimming as you cleaned the blood from your hands. He remembered the way you’d press a hand to his shoulder when his mind filled with voices, grounding him with that same heat. He’d never said thank you. He never thought he had to. You both assumed there would always be time.

Now the night stretched before him, infinite and cold.

He stepped closer before he could think to stop himself. “You should rest,” he said, though it came out like a plea.

You turned your face toward him, close enough now that he could see the faint reflection of himself in your eyes—small, distorted, flickering in the firelight. “Rest from what?” you asked. “There’s nothing left to guard. No gods to serve. No prayers to answer.”

“There is Liyue,” he said, almost reflexively.

You tilted your head, and the faintest hint of amusement crossed your lips. “Liyue does not remember us.”

He couldn’t argue with that. He wanted to—wanted to insist that duty was its own form of memory—but the words stuck in his throat. You were right. The world had moved on.

He had not.

A gust of wind swept past then, scattering a few glowing petals from a nearby bush. They caught in your hair, golden against the dark strands. You didn’t notice; you were staring out over the valley, where lanterns still flickered faintly below, distant as stars.

He reached out again, slower this time. His fingers brushed one of the petals from your hair. You turned toward him as he did, and his knuckles grazed your cheek. Your breath hitched, soft and audible in the quiet. His eyes caught the faint shimmer on your lashes, the trembling line of your mouth as if you were holding something back—words, tears, maybe both.

When you spoke, your voice was steadier than he expected. “Sometimes I think we stayed too long.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “If we hadn’t—”

You shook your head gently, and his words faltered. “I mean,” you said, “we were made for an age that no longer wants us. Maybe the kindest thing we can do is fade.”

“Fade?” His voice cracked, sharp as glass. “You would vanish while I—”

“While you what?” you asked softly. “Stand watch over ghosts?”

He fell silent. The wind answered for him.

Then, slowly, you stepped closer, until the space between you was a breath. Your hand lifted, uncertain at first, then firmer as you pressed it against his chest. He could feel your heat even through the layers of his garment; it seeped into him, unsettling and alive. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d become until that moment.

“Xiao,” you said quietly. “Do you remember the first time you told me your name?”

He nodded, barely. The memory rose unbidden: blood, wind, the crash of stone, your hand reaching through the smoke. Xiao, he had said, though it wasn’t the name given to him. You’d smiled then, as if he’d offered you something precious.

“I remember,” he said.

“You said it like it hurt.”

He looked down at you, eyes flicking over your face—the curve of your mouth, the faint soot smudge near your temple, the way your lashes trembled as you blinked. “It did.”

Your hand lingered against his chest. “Does it still?”

He wanted to lie. He wanted to say no, to give you something gentle in this cruel world. But honesty had always been his curse.

“Yes,” he said, and the word came out like a breath torn in half.

You smiled again, softer this time. “Good,” you whispered. “That means you’re still here.”

The distance between you closed, though neither could have said who moved first. Your forehead came to rest against his, and he could feel your breath against his mouth—warm, steady, carrying the faint scent of smoke and almond. For a heartbeat, everything else fell away: the ghosts, the gods, the years. There was only this—skin, heat, the faint tremor of your lips hovering just above his.

You didn’t kiss him. You didn’t have to. The moment hung there, complete in its incompletion.

When you finally drew back, your hand slipped from his chest, leaving behind a faint trace of warmth that faded too quickly. You looked at him one last time, the way one looks at a painting they will never see again.

“I’m going to the mountains,” you said quietly. “Where the fire runs beneath the rock. I’ll sleep there awhile.”

He knew what that meant. He also knew he couldn’t stop you.

“Will you wake again?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” A pause. “But if I do, I hope the world will be kind.”

He reached for you then—not to hold you, but to touch your sleeve, to anchor himself in the small proof of your presence. The fabric was warm beneath his fingers. When he looked up, your eyes met his, reflecting the faint light of your fire. For a moment, it almost looked like they were crying.

He said nothing. You didn’t need him to.

You turned and stepped back, the wind catching your hair, lifting it like flame. The air shimmered briefly around you, the edges of your form dissolving into light. He watched as the glow faded, leaving only the scent of smoke and a few sparks drifting upward into the night.

When the last ember died, Xiao was alone again.

He stood there until the stars began to blur. His hands were empty, but when he closed them, he could still feel the ghost of your warmth against his palm. The wind moved through the grasses, whispering through the silence. It sounded almost like your laugh—soft, impossible, gone before he could be sure.

Xiao tilted his head back and let the night wash over him. He didn’t pray; there was no one left to hear. But for the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel cold.