@serpenrex
liyue is as warm as he remembers, the people as effervescent, and the streets as alive with prosperity just the same as when he'd left so many months ago. a happy, light-filled place - alive with the sounds of a civilization built upon the back of a god who's thirst for blood had rivaled his own present one. perhaps the thought was blasphemous, but the harbinger had long since stopped caring about what was heresy to the archons and what wasn't. how could he truthfully give a shit, when not one - but two of them - had pulled wool so thick over his eyes he was wiping away the fibers month later.
originally, he had thought he'd gotten over it. what was the point in stewing, after all? he was but a blip on morax's - and subsequently zhongli's - long lived radar, after all. even childe, who lived at the bottom of the ocean, who drank from the wheel of the depthless stars that was the abyss, could not begin to fathom what went through an archon's head - especially one as old as he. so childe had stopped trying. for months. and months. and months. he'd slaughtered his way across battlefields, killed countless enemies of the tsarista, stained his hands even more red, and it did nothing to quell the fury in his bones.
so he was back in the harbor proper, outside the funeral parlor, and staring into familiar golden eyes.
childe is a predator. usually languid and free in movements, he is wound tight here, broad shoulders stiff and his spine ramrod straight. a smirk lilts upon the edges of his lips - but it doesn't meet his eyes. nothing every does, yet in the flicker of the liyue's warm evening glow (gold, so much gold, it makes zhongli look resplendent), they look especially dead - the bottomless hues a weapon of their own accord. he'd barely said hello, had no intent of making small talk, he'd simply had ekaterina deliver the letter to the parlor proper to request zhongli meet him at the appointed hour and now that said hour had come, childe hadn't lost his bravado - but it had faded into something more.... dangerous.
" xiansheng. " he murmurs in that firm, dulcet tone. they're not even standing that close, yet it's a familiar lover's whisper, as hands slip into the pockets of his uniform pants and he peers at the elder through thick, red lashes. " i'd like to make a contract. "