Chapter Text
When Childe first arrives at Liyue Airport, he does not gawk at the picturesque mountainscapes in the distance, nor does he marvel at the crystalline clear blue sky, free from the gloomy clouds that hung over Snezhnaya all year long.
Instead, he is busy shedding his thick parka whilst scanning the crowd huddled around the arrivals section of the airport, all waiting and holding up signs with the names of people they are picking up. To be completely honest, he feels wildly out of place with his winter clothes, bright hair, and giant worn suitcase that has Teucer’s action figure stickers plastered all over it in the most disorderly manner possible.
Dragging his suitcase behind him—and almost running over the toes of multiple people who fix him with unrestrained glares—Childe fumbles around his pockets for his phone. Once found, he unlocks it, sitting down on a nearby bench and opening up his messaging app. He scrolls through his chats to locate his conversation with 'Guizhong', his apparent new roommate, and taps on her profile picture to get a better look at her face.
Childe furrows his brows and looks around him. There wasn’t anyone that matched her features from his quick look through the crowd.
“God,” he mutters under his breath, sending a quick i’m here, where are u into the chat and momentarily regretting the fact that they didn’t organise a specific meeting place because, wow, he thinks with another quick turn of his head, this place is huge. Childe’s afraid that if he moves away any further from where he is, he’ll end up in an entirely different pocket dimension altogether.
Fifteen minutes, two outgoing missed calls, and a scroll through the entirety of his Twitter timeline later (Viktor taking selfies during church, Ekaterina complaining about her recent blind date, the usual), and Guizhong still hasn’t replied, her dainty portrait smiling merrily from next to her previous messages.
Childe groans and locks his phone, throwing his head back to stare at the high ceiling. There’s a baby screeching somewhere to his right, and the sound grates incessantly at his ears.
Maybe Guizhong’s late, he reasons, or maybe her phone broke on the way here and—
Suddenly, a mess of inky black hair pops into his vision.
Childe yelps, his surprise causing him to suddenly sit up and bash his head against the stranger’s. “Ow!”
“Ah!” The stranger recoils as quickly as he appeared, holding a hand to his forehead. “I’m terribly sorry. It was not my intention to startle you.”
Childe mirrors his motion, immediately scrambling to plaster a smile across his face because this guy is… handsome, to say the very least. High cheekbones, golden irises, a messy bun of dark hair, and an alluring touch of rouge eyeliner beneath his eyes.
Oh. Huh. The airport suddenly feels very, very warm.
“It’s okay,” Childe reassures the stranger hastily, trying to push down the flush rising on his cheeks, “It’s my fault for reacting the way I did.”
“I apologise,” the Liyuen man says again with a bow of his head and Childe is now holding his hands up and stuttering as he tries to compute the fact that maybe he’s? Getting hit on? Within thirty minutes of arriving in this country? “Not just for inducing accidental bodily harm, but for being less than punctual as well.”
“Huh?” Childe drops his hands. “What do you mean?”
“I am here to pick you up,” the stranger clarifies, his face strangely and comedically solemn for the current situation, “My name is Zhongli.”
“You mean ‘pick me up’ as in take me on a—?”
“No,” the other man deadpans, “as part of my obligation as your new roommate.”
Childe’s brain short-circuits a bit. “Huh? Sorry, but I’m waiting for a ‘Guizhong’... you must have the wrong person.”
Zhongli frowns, and Childe’s brain instantly snapshots the sight and pastes it directly into his mental dictionary next to the word ‘cute’. “Then I suppose I am the ‘Guizhong’ you are looking for, in this case.”
Childe reaches for his phone. “Wait, wait, wait, but Guizhong is a woman,” he says, showing Zhongli the woman in question’s profile picture. “And you’re…” a man. A very stunning, ‘I-would-instantly-empty-my-wallet-for-you’ type of man, but a man nonetheless, “...not exactly that.”
“I—”
Zhongli’s phone rings right at that moment, a strange little tune that Childe swears he has heard before but can’t exactly pinpoint from when. Zhongli reaches into the pocket of his fashionable trench coat, pulls out a Nokia flip phone (what the fuck) and brings it to his ear.
“I found him,” he says without even glancing at the name on the screen. “Yes… no. No. He thinks— please stop yelling, I do not understand what you’re talking about.”
Childe stands there awkwardly, not quite able to comprehend how a man with a Burberry coat and Gucci loafers is still carrying around brick for a telecommunication device in this day and age. Reality is truly stranger than fiction.
“...Okay.” Zhongli says almost petulantly, before he hands his phone to Childe. “Here. Guizhong would like to talk with you.”
By now, Childe has begun piecing together the fact the Zhongli and Guizhong are most probably, definitely, two separate people, and that some strange miscommunication has likely occurred somewhere during the process of him just wanting to avoid being tragically homeless his new country of residence.
“Hello?” he asks into the phone. “Guizhong, right?”
“Yep!” Guizhong chirps, her voice a bit fuzzy and staticy through the outdated device. “Sorry about all the confusion! I wanted you to get acquainted with Zhongli without me being there in person, but I guess I forgot to tell you that I’m not actually, well, him, haha!”
“Er… haha,” Childe says, not sure how to respond, “it’s alright. Everything’s sorted out now, yeah?”
“I guess so. Well, cool beans,” Guizhong laughs, “I’ll meet you two at Zhongli’s apartment to help you guys set up. See you in an hour!”
“Huh? Oh, okay, b—,” the call disconnects, “—ye.”
Childe stares at Zhongli’s Nokia, feeling a little disoriented. Zhongli shoots him a look of tired solidarity.
“For the record, I have no idea why she insisted on finding my roommate for me. I thought I was capable of doing so myself,” Zhongli explains flatly. “So you are as much of a surprise to me as I am to you.”
Childe huffs out a laugh. He can’t say he’s displeased. “A pretty good surprise then.”
Zhongli blinks in confusion, and Childe feels his heart squeeze a little. He scratches his cheek and turns his head away. “Um. Nothing, let’s go!”
“I do not have any mora on me,” Zhongli says quietly when they’re in front of Zhongli’s apartment, trying to pay the taxi driver the fare for the trip.
Childe gawks, his face twisting with bewilderment. “How did you get to the airport, then?”
“The driver let me off the hook in exchange for my phone number,” Zhongli says, as if that wasn’t the sketchiest thing in the world. Childe makes a face.
“It’s alright,” he says while reaching for his wallet, “I’ll pay.”
Guizhong is standing in front of the elevators as they enter the foyer, dressed in a flowing white sundress and sandal heels. Her smile is warm and youthful like the afternoon sunshine. She looks almost ethereal. If Childe were a little more heterosexual, he would definitely be trying to arrange a dinner date by this point.
“Hey!” She waves, and Childe waves back, eased by her easygoing attitude, “welcome to Zhongli-xiansheng’s humble abode!”
She gestures around the foyer—which is evidently not Zhongli’s abode, but it’s close enough.
“Zhongli… what?” Childe asks, the local Liyuen honorific lost on him. Teyvatian may be the universal language of the world, but every nation still has its nuances. He makes himself a reminder to pick up a book on Liyuen language and customs to brush up on later.
“Please do not worry about it,” Zhongli tells him as they huddle into the elevator and he swipes his keycard for the fifth floor, “It is an honorific of respect towards one’s elder, but when Guizhong uses it, it simply serves as a way of teasing me.”
“Not my fault you walk and talk like an old man all the time,” Guizhong points out.
As Zhongli is unlocking the door to his apartment, a strange sound of scratching comes from behind the door. Before Childe can open his mouth and ask about it, the door opens and Childe is promptly greeted with a face full of brown fur.
“Morax!” Zhongli exclaims, and Childe would be swooning over how smoothly his voice flows with a bit of emotion in it if he wasn’t already busy sputtering and spitting out bits of fur from his mouth.
Zhongli pulls the big furry lump away from his face, dangles it—a cat—by its nape and looks disapprovingly at it. “That is not how we treat guests.”
The cat… Morax, meows in response, its tail flicking side to side. It is the furriest thing Childe has ever seen in his life, and Childe is someone who has seen Viktor’s unshaved legs.
“Told you that you needed to train some manners into your fur son,” Guizhong says, helping Childe move his luggage into the apartment. “You spoil him too much.”
Childe picks the last bit of hair from his tongue before he turns towards Zhongli in disbelief. He looks at the man, looks at the cat, then looks back at the man. “‘Morax’?”
“That’s right.” Zhongli replies, bending down to let the little furry devil trot off into the apartment.
Childe watches the animal retreat around the corner before he turns back towards Zhongli. “You adopt what is possibly the fluffiest maine coon in all of Teyvat… and you decide to name it after a demon. The ruler of hell.”
Zhongli raises his eyebrows. “I do not see a problem with that.”
Childe opens his mouth to protest, before he remembers the ferocity that Morax had exhibited in launching itself onto Childe as if his face were nothing more than a shiny new squeaky toy. “...I guess so.”
Zhongli’s apartment is… unorthodox, for the lack of a better term. It’s very much an organised chaos more than anything—somehow managing to simultaneously tread the thin line between orderly and disorderly, between uncluttered and utterly disastrous.
Everything is where it’s supposed to be—the television is snug against the wall, the table is placed towards the kitchen peninsula so that one is able to access the rooms in a direct route from the couch area. But everywhere Childe lands his eyes, he can spot at least ten different things in his field of vision—clusters of strange, multicoloured ores on the shelves, multiple ancient Liyuen-style calligraphy artworks hung on the walls, an ornate room divider in the corner that seems to serve no purpose other than to look pretty, frog statues made of jade sitting next to a bamboo pot plant next to a marble vase almost as tall as Childe, the list goes on…
“Where do I put my stuff?” Childe asks, still looking around the room and playing a spontaneous game of Where’s Waldo with himself, except instead of a stripey little man, he’s searching for something that would actually see practical use in everyday life.
“Over here,” Zhongli says whilst shrugging off his coat, and, wow, his waist is tiny, “in your room.”
Childe follows his new roommate into the bedroom, not exactly sure what to expect. He breathes a shallow sigh of relief when Zhongli flicks the lights on and presents him with a rather neat, albeit bare space.
“This room used to belong to Guizhong, but she had to move to the other side of the city for work,” Zhongli explains, “Now it is yours. Please feel free to customise it as you see fit.”
“You two used to live together?” Childe asks. “There’s already enough stuff in this apartment with you alone in it.”
Zhongli chuckles, the sound soft and soothing. “Guizhong had taken up much more space than me. She even converted the balcony into her mini workshop for her industrial design projects. Though I admit.. since she moved out, I may have taken up a habit of buying more than I need—”
“You started hoarding, that’s what you started doing!” Guizhong yells from the kitchen. “Me moving out was so shocking that you had to turn to material objects to fill that newly formed Guizhong-shaped hole in your heart!”
Zhongli whips his head around. “It’s not like tha—”
“I’m hurt, Zhongli-xiansheng! ” Guizhong whines with her head in the fridge as she fumbles around for something. “So now you’re saying I meant nothing to you? Not after I spent five years rooming with you? Not after I wasted my entire childhood trying to bail you out of trouble after you kept beating the snot out of the kids on our street?”
Childe can’t help but burst out laughing. Zhongli brings his hand up to rub at his temples. “I did not senselessly ‘beat the snot out’ of them. I only did so to defend you and Havria from their harassment.”
Guizhong pops her head out from behind the fridge door. “Yeah, and that was enough to get you cemented as our local thug—a tiny elementary school kid absolutely pummelling a bunch of middle schoolers.” She turns towards Childe and shoots him a wink. “If you ever run into trouble, you know who to call for backup, yeah?”
“Actually, I’m pretty good in a brawl myself,” Childe inputs, “I’d love to see if I can match hand-to-hand with xiansheng here.”
Zhongli sighs. “Not you too.”
Childe walks over to the kitchen, taking in the ingredients Guizhong paid out on the kitchen bench. “What’re these for?”
There’s a dangerous glint in Guizhong’s eyes. “A trial.”
“A trial?”
Guizhong closes the fridge. There are little souvenir magnets and sticky notes all over the door. She puts her hand on her hips and gestures towards the ingredients; tofu, rice, multiple types of proteins, and an assortment of vegetables.
Guizhong grins. “As you may or may not know,” Childe does not know, “Zhongli here is incapable of cooking.”
“I won our high school culinary competitions.” Zhongli protests under his breath, but Guizhong catches it anyway.
“Correction:” she says, “Zhongli here is incapable of cooking for himself.”
Childe snorts. “So that’s why you told me you were specifically looking for someone with ‘world class cooking skills’ on flatmate dot com?”
Guizhong claps her hands together. “Exactly! I’ve seen how well you cook already from your social media, so just think of this as an induction of sorts. If you make something that can live up to Zhongli’s picky tastes, I’ll discount your rent.”
“I thought I was the landlord here.” Zhongli walks over to them, and Guizhong shushes him with a hand over his mouth. The man crosses his arms, but makes no move to swat Guizhong away.
Childe is already rolling up his sleeves at this point, a playful smirk dancing across his lips. He is so ready for this. “No worries. Watch me wow this guy off his feet.”
Zhongli smiles from behind Guizhong’s hand, his eyes shimmering under the warm kitchen lights. “Surprise me.”
“Mmh! This is amazing!” Guizhong exclaims between mouthfuls of stir fry—one of the few Liyuen dishes that Childe knows how to cook—before piling more food into her bowl. “It’s even better than the stuff made by locals.”
“Thanks, that’s some pretty high praise.” Childe grins, stabbing his plastic fork into a piece of chicken.
(Unfortunately, the trio realised too late that Childe is physically incapable of using chopsticks until dinner was almost served, which prompted Zhongli into making a dash for the nearby 7-Eleven to buy a twenty pack of plastic forks, which would hopefully last them until either Childe learns how to wield the fiddly eating utensils, or they go out to buy more environmentally friendly metal forks.)
“What’s the verdict?” Guizhong turns towards Zhongli, who is chewing slowly on a piece of xianggu and nodding approvingly.
“Good,” he says. Childe beams.
Guizhong claps her hands. “It’s settled, then! Welcome to the team!”
“What team?” Childe asks.
Zhongli looks awkwardly away from the table. Guizhong leans forward. “The ‘Helping Zhongli Be A Functional Member Of Society’ team’, of course!”
Morax takes that opportunity from the lapse in the conversation to lift his head from the cat bowl and meow in agreement.
Childe is in the kitchen at ass-o’-clock later that night, heating up leftovers in the microwave when he feels a presence behind him, and a warm breath ghosting across his nape.
“Munchies?”
Childe almost springs out of his skin. “Son of a— fuck!”
Zhongli jumps back, his eyes widening. “I apologise—I didn’t intend to frighten you.”
Childe drops his combat stance. The microwave beeps. “Sorry, my fault. I overreacted.”
He takes the food out of the microwave, wincing a little when his fingers make contact with the hot pyrex container. Zhongli follows behind him to the dinner table with a question in his eyes. His hair is tied into a low, side ponytail and his face is softer from a lack of makeup. He has cat slippers on his feet.
An entirely different sight from when Childe first saw him—tall, stoic, almost regal.
“Jet lag.” Childe answers Zhongli’s unasked query tiredly.
“I see.”
He deflects the question back. “Why are you still up?”
Zhongli blinks slowly, looking not fully awake. “I… often wake at random hours of the night.” He replies. Childe frowns.
“That can’t be normal.”
“It has been the norm for me for years,” Zhongli says with a slight smile. “Please don’t worry about it.”
He takes a seat at the table opposite to Childe, seemingly watching his roommate eat, but Childe can already tell that he’s simply zoning out. They (read: Childe) eat in silence for a while as the clock’s hour hand slowly inches towards two in the morning. It’s a bit awkward in all honesty, mostly attributed to the fact that Zhongli has gone as still as a rock, and Childe doesn’t have much material to create a meaningful conversation from, given that he’s only really known the other man for half a day.
Morax slinks out from behind Zhongli’s bedroom door, evidently woken up by Childe’s cussing and the aroma of food. He meows and hops onto Zhongli’s lap with the grace of a dolphin despite his bulky stature, and that seems to startle his owner out of his half-asleep state.
“Oh.” He blinks. “Hungry?”
Morax rubs his head against Zhongli’s chest. Childe wishes he had his phone with him to take a picture.
After giving Morax his midnight snack and letting Childe finish his, the three of them sprawl out on the couch, letting the soft light of the television wash over them as Childe flicks through the channels and Zhongli cards his hands through his cat’s fur.
They fall asleep just like that—National Geographic: Liyue Edition running on the screen and Morax’s cat snores drowning out those of his humans, as morning light bleeds from the tips of the mountains and into the night.