Chapter Text
Childe smells it before he sees anything.
The woodshed is small and dark and frankly, dingy. In the late evening that falling, it’s not really possible to make out anything over the lumpy shape of wood. But there’s the smell unmistakable and overwhelming—sweeter than the nectar of honeydew, thicker than a fur cloak. He cannot make out the individual notes, but it is the scent of something far more dangerous than—
—crack. It must have been rigged, the floorboards, or perhaps rotten, but now as it splinters under his feet, Childe inhales on reflex and the scent becomes cloying and oppressive, insidiously crawling soft fingers down the back of his throat—
His hydro bursts from him, a massive bloom of water and falls on everything. The smell dissipates like smoke. Childe coughs, and shivers.
“Come in,” he calls to his subordinates. “This is the warehouse. Put something over your nose and eyes.”
He is sweating and world is pulsing around him.
Childe tries to breathe deeply, take in long swallows of the cold air that blows through their campsite. The arousal curls through him, a hot wash of honey-sweet, sticky thing. Clings to him and doesn’t let go, like mud. It makes his chest ache and his thighs tense. Under his jacket, his shirt is soaked through. He wants to cup his dick.
“Another shot,” he tells the medic.
“Lord Harbinger,” the medic says, and Childe abruptly notices how his scent has soured, become stale like an unclean mouth. Fear? It’s not unusual to be scared off an harbinger, but he has never put his men ill at ease. But then again, he has never been in pre-rut around them. “I’ve given you the maximum dose just an hour back. Please, I don’t think I should administer anymore. Either way, in my professional opinion, the shots are ineffective, at best, a mild deterrent.”
“How is that possible? I’ve always taken them according to schedule, and I was told that they are the best there is.”
The medic lowers his eyes. Childe can detect a faint tremble in his hands. “It might be that you have grown immune to them, Lord Harbinger.”
“Aren’t they a cocktail of suppressants, precisely to avoid this?”
“It also might be because to the drug we encountered in the shed, Lord Harbinger, that the suppressants are not taking effect.”
“Which is it?”
The medic recoils. He hadn’t meant for it to come out so sharp, but the flash of heat that runs down his back his back is unpleasant even in the numbing cold of Dragonspine. He can feel his scent rise in clouds, stink up the place with sweat and musk—it lodges deep in his throat. He wants—he wants to—
“We are not familiar with it, Lord Harbinger,” the medic says, eyes lowered. A part of him hums in approval. The rest of him recoils from the lack of professionalism in his own behaviour. He had always been so careful to enforce it among his troops and on himself when it came to them that guilt throbs in his chest.
You have been infected. Act like it. You have to assess the situation and resolve it without endangering your battalion.
If only his body would listen. He takes a long drink of water from his canteen, which is more ice than water. It makes him feel better, but only slightly.
“We are going to get to Liyue Harbour as soon as possible.” He announces, a headache starting bubble over his forehead. “You have five minutes to pack up.”
He should go to his apartment, and send a message to Ekaterina to arrange for a professional rut partner and his leave. He should send someone out of to restock his food supplies in his apartment, because he has manners and it’s the worst of manners to let his rut-partner go unfed.
He should not be standing under the eaves of a certain deceitful and divine funeral consultant, his body practically thrumming with the beginnings of the rut-fever.
He hasn’t even forgiven this—this—what is he? A man? An adeptus? They have had the chance to lunch once after the incident and Childe had been too sullen and angry to hold a conversation and Zhongli had been—in his opinion, too complacent to sound truly sorry. Besides, it’s not as if he had anything to be particularly sorry about—this had been the outcome that he had meticulously planned to achieve—it was only Childe and his misplacement sense of entitlement over Zhongli and his business.
He had left the restaurant angry and restless, thinking about the last year where they had gone to the opera on a summer evening like this, and what he had found is this: Zhongli with a bottle of expensive baijiu in his hand, sitting on the steps of his house.
I cannot ask for forgiveness for something I don’t regret, he had said, but if you want, we can have a spar.
Childe had wanted to smack him and hug him at the same time. Seeing him, so close, had felt like pressing a fingernail into a fresh bruise. Fine. Let’s go right now.
They had their spar in a plateau of the Tianheng, on yellow and green grass turned copper in the sunset; these had been the conditions, if Childe won in a spar with only wooden spears and hand-to-hand combat, only then would he be allowed to use his vision or delusion. They had fought until Childe had felt every single breath he pulled was edged with broken glass and one of his ankles was either sprained or broken, the sky lit only with star and the lights of the Harbour. And then Zhongli had pulled him into an effortless headlock and said, do you yield? And Childe had been so furious at himself that he had said yes and then nailed Zhongli in the jaw.
Zhongli had carried him back to Bubu Pharmacy. Later that night, they had drunk that entire bottle of baijiu sitting on the steps of Zhongli’s house, Childe still angry at both of them and wanting him so much that it was a raw ache over the pain of his muscles, had sat in sullen silence as Zhongli told him the stories of constellations. In the morning, he had woken up in a warm bed that smelled of glaze lilies and wintermint. Zhongli had been in the kitchen, brewing tea, a bruise blooming purple and blue on his jaw, right under his lip. As if someone had kissed him with ink on their lips.
Can’t you heal that, like in a minute?
Oh, this? Certainly. Would you like some tea?
He had left without saying another word, not even a goodbye. How—
And then he had come to Dragonspine.
It stung, even now. After trudging snow for close to two weeks, and body aching with pre-rut, somehow this still hurt the most, painful as a deep infection.
Why was he even here?
Childe swallowed back the saliva that was pooling in his mouth, like hunger, and raised his hand to knock.
“I am willing to offer my assistance,” Zhongli says, his eyes a cool, steady gold. In the dimness of the room and the approaching dusk, Zhongli looks smeared. His hair falls over his shoulder, a long tumble of ink and amber. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, and his thin wrists and fine-boned hands gleam under the rolled-up cuffs of his navy shirt. He looks so lovely that Childe’s mouth is desert-dry. “Your rut will be, if I am proven correct, more difficult and perhaps more aggressive than your previous ones. While professional rut partners might be not entirely unequipped to deal with a situation like that, they are also more susceptible to injury, and possible threat of a pregnancy—after all, we do not know what this powder has done to your virility. Whereas my constitution is much sturdier, cannot be impregnated and would not be adversely affected at all.”
“What?” Childe says, thunderstruck.
“If you wish, I can prepare a bath—”
“No,” Childe snaps, and then when Zhongli raises an eyebrow at him, he continues in a more placating tone. “No, I didn’t—I didn’t come here to ask you to help—”
“But that is what you told me,” Zhongli argues, mouth twisted in thought. “That you came here urgently to ask for my help.”
“Not—not this sort of help! I wanted to ask you if you knew of any sort of cure of something like this!”
“Oh, I see,” Zhongli says, leaning back in his seat. His eyes recede, distant, academic. How easy it is for him, to offer himself and then recede behind his veil of warm impersonal concern—how inhuman. On the other hand, here is he, fumbling out desperate excuses to cover himself up, to not let the burning heat of his body not swallow him whole. He grips the hand-rest of the chair he's sitting on; the hard, smooth edge of the wood digs painfully into the bones of his palm. It offers no distraction. Sweat slides hotly under his clothes, over his back and his chest. He wipes at the fine lines of perspiration that refuses to leave his upper lip.
Why is he here? Why—He is a harbinger, he could have found himself the best rut partner Liyue has to offer—so, why is he, in the home of this person, god, the ancient walking personification of Liyue? How is this not some sort of blasphemy, him sitting here, the foreign liege of a foreign god, clouding up their divine realm with the muddy stink of his humanity and his fathomless lust?
How is it that Zhongli’s scent—or what is it, an absence of scent?—soothes and inflames him at the same time? An alpha in rut is biologically conditioned to try an find an suitable omega to spend their rut with, though there are some like him, who find equal pleasure in beta rut partners, and he has heard of some omegas who prefer to spend their heats in the company of other omegas and betas. He tries to push his muddling mind into some semblance of ordered thought—Zhongli who used to smell like a beta before, and now smells like—like nothing, smoke on snow. Oh, there is sandalwood and agar, and with hints of silk flowers and something rich and deep, like the forest floor, but nothing of those notes that stir that tiny pea-sized gland that sits just behind his forehead bone, like Dottore once explained, and tells him, oh, an omega. Or a beta. Or an alpha. No scent mark at all.
And yet, his cock is rising, and the heat in his belly is rising with unsatisfied urgency and Childe feels as if he will twist out of his own skin out of want. He wants so badly that his head hurts, wants to rub his bare skin against Zhongli’s, wants to ride his thighs until they are slick with his cum, wants to see Zhongli impaled and squirming on his knot until he spills and struggles and hardens again and is tormented to orgasm once more. Wants to keep him knotted for hours, skin aglow with sweat, back arched as Childe mouths at his nipples until they are sore.
He’s so hard that he can feel his heart beat in his cock.
“The substance—powdery, you said?—you encountered might be specific from Dragonspine itself, and while I might be able to identify it, it will not be speedy enough for you to recover from your pre-rut,” Zhongli’s nostrils flare, “There is not enough time for us to act even if I could identify the substance here and now. You are very close to entering true rut."
"I'm okay, I can--"
Your pupils are completely dilated, and you seem to be sufficiently aroused." Childe's collar feels uncomfortably tight. Zhongli's eyes are narrow. "Your scent is changing as we speak. You smell like rich plum wine—”
Childe doesn’t hear the rest of it. There is a pounding in his ear from all the blood beating against his skull, and a red haze over his eyes and then—
—then he’s standing over Zhongli, crouched, coiled like a viper about to strike, his mouth in a snarl, filled with saliva and blood from the lip he has bitten, and there is a handful of Zhongli’s silky hair in his fist.
Zhongli stares at him, with calm eyes blown gold. So close, he smells like an unfurling orchid, a sweet light flavour lingering on his tongue—it reminds Childe of that the yellow-gold tea he likes so much. Zhongli’s neck is curved in a beautiful arch as Childe breathes over where his scent gland would have been, and Childe—
Puts his mouth over that missing thing, and sucks hard. Under him, Zhongli shivers, and he bites down, mindless with want; he’s vaguely aware that he’s trying to pull Zhongli up so he can coax him to wrap his legs around him, and Childe can bite him more make him his, mine mine mine—
“It’s alright, shh, it’s alright,” Zhongli soothes, his voice rich and warm by his ear, and Childe is lost.
When he comes back to himself, he has pulled Zhongli off the chair, and has him pressed close, with his other arm around his waist in a death grip. If Zhongli hadn’t been inhumanly strong, and hence able to hold his balance and keep still in this weird unnatural position that Childe is holding him in, they would have both tumbled onto the floor. His breath blows warm and ticklish on Childe’s ear and Childe thinks his own skin might split open with the pressure that is rising under it, hot and viscous like the syrup they dip hawthorn in.
So much for his refusal to allow Zhongli to help him. Now he is here, teething at his neck like an alpha in their first rut, his cock so heavy and hard that the ache is spreading all the way to his back muscles, a hollow cramping in his abdominal muscles.
“Zhongli-xiansheng,” he rasps, forcing himself to let go though it seems impossible to ever move from where he is, or want to move. He is an adult alpha, a feared and respected Harbinger of her majesty, the Cryo Archon—and this is—Zhongli, the person who was his friend, his confidante, the former Geo Archon, the oldest of the seven, an entity of impossible power, and even more impossible history, the entity that brought him to Liyue to play a part in his own twisted drama—he has to maintain some semblance of dignity. Zhongli, who is even more beautiful than before with red spots blooming over his neck, his hair pulled out of his ponytail. Zhongli, who is not human and not his.
He takes a step back, and watches Zhongli straighten himself. Childe has pulled his shirt loose and askew, so there is a thin strip of skin visible at his side, and Childe wants, furiously, to cover it in crescent shapes of his mouth.
“I am very sorry for my lapse,” he croaks. Sweat trickles down his cheek. Zhongli takes a step towards him, and Childe pulls himself back, tries to rein in the ferocious hunger that tells him to pounce on Zhongli and sink his—
“Childe,” Zhongli says. He sounds so firm and decisive that Childe wants to cling to the grounding timbre of his voice. “Childe, listen to me. I am concerned about what hardship will be imposed on you if you do not allow yourself to fully go into rut—there have been instances of damage to elemental pathways from denied heats and ruts. In some cases they are irreversible, and your body is already overtaxed with lack of proper rest and the onslaught of the rut. We have no knowledge of what this substance might have done to you and as I am unable to predict its nature or its full effects, we cannot risk permanent harm to your body and its pathways.”
He stops, and Childe breaths, tries to focus on his voice and comprehend; he cannot think past all the things that he wants to do Zhongli now, all the things he wants now and then, forever, only if, only if—
“Being your rut partner is of no hardship to me,” Zhongli finishes, determined and quiet, his face placid like a winter pond. “Childe, I offer myself. Please trust me.”
How dare Zhongli pity him? How dare he ask Childe to trust him, how dare he offer himself as—as a rut partner to him, a mere pawn? How dare he make it seem like a favour between friends, an easy impersonal offer as any, rather than either a slice of divine celestial grace or something else, a ploy to gain something out of Childe or his Archon? How dare he be this sincere?
“No, you listen to me,” he gestures to stop Zhongli coming closer, and Zhongli stops, his eyes cool and careful and so utterly composed that it makes a lance of hurt ricochet straight down his throat. “You don’t get what you are offering. If we do this, if I spend my rut with you, if I touch you again, I will fuck you in ways you haven’t even thought off, and I will fuck you until you can’t even beg anymore—I will knot you until I can’t, and then some more. I can’t stop if we start, even if you beg me to, I won’t be able to stop unless you knock me out. You aren’t an omega, Zhongli-xiansheng, and as much as I understand, your mortal shell is, well, mortal. Knotting will not be pleasurable, it will hurt. And I will bite you to make you do stuff that you won’t get because you don’t have the instincts.”
This is the part he swallows, and it will cost me all of my sanity and my dignity to do this with you, only this. For me to walk away from you and not look back and want everything—to want a home.
What has happened to him? How can he be this pathetic—it’s not that he hasn’t had a rut in Liyue, there was one, one yearly rut that he allows himself to keep all the bits of his body functional, and smooth-flowing, and he had spent that quietly with a highly professional and skilled omega from an esteemed house of pleasure. He had thought of Zhongli for a bit then, of the sliver of skin that peeked out from under his gloves and the warm stretch of it under his nose, but nothing like this—nothing at all.
This is—this is—
“Childe,” Zhongli says as calm as a mountain in the horizon, “You cannot harm me.”
You can, Childe wants to scream, but he clings sullenly to the last scraps of his dignity, his body a livewire of want and dull, throbbing pain from his tense muscles. “Zhongli xiansheng, please don’t do anything you will regret. It was stupid of me to come here--”
“I will not. Childe, I am more than capable of caring for myself, you know this,” There is a shadow under Zhongli’s brows, the way he does when there is something is frustrating him. How can he want this so much—how can he be this self-sacrificing? “I only want to make sure you are alright.”
A god should not be this selfless—they are not meant to be. At least not for a single human who’s blood belongs to another god. Unfair of the God of Contracts to be this lenient because how can he walk away from this? How can he walk away from this—this man, god, adeptus?
This is what he had thought of when he was on the ship back home: Zhongli, under the shade of a sand bearer tree, a Qingxin is his teeth, only because Childe had said he couldn’t imagine the dignified and serious funeral parlour consultant ever doing something like that, the shimmering violet of an hot evening, the scent of honeysuckles closing around them.
Another memory rises in him—a lazy evening at Three-rounds-knockout, the taste of firewater prickling his mouth with its smooth heat, the warm cast of the hanging eight-sided lantern on the curve of Zhongli’s face, the sweep of his eyelashes casting feathery shadows over his cheekbones. The faint laughter in the background—everything warm and carefree and content, Zhongli's eyes brighter than any cor lapis he has ever seen.
Even if it breaks his heart—and how much more can it break, really? How much heart does he have left to shatter? Childe is not a person who thinks of the future so much so that he ruins the present—so why not stick to that—why not take this offer from this person that he clearly wants—why not think of the bridge when he has burn it?
For three or four days, he can be in heaven—he can have all of his late-night fantasies. Why not take them and then walk away, rather than leave empty handed and forever yearning? He would be an indulgence for Zhongli, a memory perhaps to be recalled once in a century. If Zhongli is willing to give, why can’t he take?
“Are you sure?” He asks. One last time. One last chance. Under his skin, desire crackles like fireworks, almost nauseating in it’s raw intensity.
“Yes,” Zhongli says, as firm as bedrock, and Childe drowns, a moth in an open flame.
“You have to know some things,” He says, when he can breathe again. The steady ache of denied rut has now mellowed into simmering embers of anticipation—he had pulled Zhongli down to his lap and buried his face in the hollow between his neck and shoulder, until he could feel his belly unknot itself. They should move to the bedroom soon, as his rut draws closer—but Childe wants this, wants to just hold him, feel Zhongli’s solidness against him, feel his palms gently smooth over Childe’s spine, and hold the back of his head as he fervently scented Zhongli. An illusion, but Childe would take it. He will take everything that this temporary bubble will offer him.
“Tell me,” Zhongli sounds calm and unhurried as ever, even though his pulse jumps against Childe’s lips. Childe strokes the patch of skin on his lower back, where he has pulled Zhongli’s shirt out.
“You’re not an omega or a trained rut partner, so this might be difficult for you to do, but it's important that you remember this stuff,” he says, tracing that smooth, warm skin. Unblemished for now. “But don’t try to stop me—it won’t work unless you knock me out, so if you really have to just do that.”
“Thank you for the permission, I appreciate the clarifications.”
“Don’t be so snarky,” he mumbles. “Really. I won’t get it later and just bite you.”
Zhongli laughs silently—more a vibration than a sound. Childe pulls him closer, flush with himself, grinding against him just a little, and tries not to think about all the things they are about to do—hopefully this juvenile embarrassment that’s making his ears burn will ease off with the onset of the rut.
“You should—ah, umm—present yourself to me,” How can he be this embarrassed! They are two grown men about to have rut sex—that’s it. That’s all there is. He is telling these to Zhongli because he doubts the former Archon of Liyue knows all the do’s and don’t’s of assisting an alpha in rut—it isn’t probably knowledge that you need to run a country and give it your divine protection. “You know what that means?”
“Yes, I have read extensively about the mating rituals and the instinctive behaviour of an alpha coupling with a rut partner,” Zhongli says, sounding so academic that they might as well be in Heyu Teahouse, not tangled in the middle of his sitting room. It makes Childe’s ears burn even more, somehow. He hates the heat crawling up his collar, and this strange juvenile shame that’s currently flooding his belly, creating a strange mix with the thrumming arousal that’s just barely receded. “While I have not experienced it firsthand myself, I know most of the behaviours that is expected from the rut partner—compliance, presentation, avoiding any acts that might come across as rejection to the alpha.”
“Yes,” Childe breathes. He hasn’t tasted Zhongli’s skin yet—but as the fever courses through him, most of Zhongli’s words are lost in his thoughts of how it will taste—how human? Not human at all? He breathes in that deep scent, the one that reminds of caves and meadows and underground rivers, and all he wants to do is let his body go, let it take its fill. “One more request.”
“Of course.”
“Let me leave marks,” he says, ignoring the wild beating of his heart against his ribs. What a simple request, and how much it means.
Zhongli says nothing, and for a wild, panicky moment, Childe thinks he has somehow wormed his way into his head and pulled from him the true intent of that request, seen through all his empty bravado, and now is going to turn him away. How can a god love a mortal thing like that?
“Of course,” Zhongli says, and presses his mouth to Childe’s head in a kiss, ruffling his hair with his breath and Childe feels the tenderness of it drip all the way down to his heart, like a curtain of molten wax. His heart aches from it.
He should have walked away, when he could have. Too late.
They stay like that for a while, stagnant, sunk into the comfort of each other; Childe lets the relief of holding him so close permeate all the soft animal parts of him, allow the shape of Zhongli’s bones under his finger sand away the rough edges of his want, leaving him with a warm, smooth thing that beats in time with his heart, all the way to his toes.
“Come, let me loose,” he hears Zhongli whisper to him, and in sudden fear, clutches him closer—he’s not sure what would happen if he does, but there is no doubt it would be something terrible, but Zhongli pulls back to cup his face with his cool palms, his eyes a warm honey, and says. “For a bit. I must write a note to your agents when they come by informing them of your safety, and your whereabouts, and a note to the Director about taking a leave. I will also check that there is enough food for your sustenance.”
“What will I do?” He asks stupidly, and is gratified by the open fondness on Zhongli’s face; what will he do to see that everyday, he thinks treacherously. He should be the one making sure that there’s enough food for his partner, but this is not his house—and he is already imposing. He shouldn’t be needling around the abode of a god.
“Take a bath,” Zhongli tells him, already pulling himself free from Childe. He stands up, and the loss of his warmth and his smell is almost a physical chill to Childe. He almost follows, and then leans back. Zhongli stretches out a hand to him.“I assume you did not have many chances in Dragonspine to do so. It will feel good. I will join you soon.”
It takes a bit of time and cajoling, but soon he’s soaking in a fragrant tub of hot water; Zhongli was right, it does feel good, makes all the knots in his muscle come loose. He washes his hair and all the nooks and crannies of his body until he feels pink. The shallow, half-healed cuts that litter his skin sting gently. His clothes had been stiff with sweat and smelt positively rank. Dragonspine was too cold and the camps too exposed for a bath, and since he had inhaled the drug, he had been sweating like a pig. It is a welcome distraction to feel so clean and well-scrubbed.
He keeps his ears sharp, instinctively tracking his partner as much as he can, a vague sense of vigilance rising in him, another side-effect of going into rut. If it was anyone else, Childe is sure he could have traced their footfalls, but Zhongli is quieter than a ghost, even in his own house. The only signs that he is still here are the soft clatters and even gentler swishes, what is Zhongli doing?
His body is starting to burn again with the first, fierce swell of his rut. He's sweating in the water, and he can feel the heat march over his spine like a long line of ants; the only place he wants to be is inside Zhongli, to taste his skin and be pressed against him. He pulls himself out of the bath, and looks for towels to dry himself.
Zhongli has left him some loose robes to put; how thoughtful and unnecessary, he thinks, draping them over his shoulder, but leaving them untied. His cock is hard and thick, a deep red, already softly swollen at the base—he leaves it exposed. Zhongli should see how capable he is, how well he can provide for him. What a good alpha he can be.
And then, Childe steps into the room.