Chapter Text
The party’s over, but Childe sits outside. “The logs are cold,” he remarks, letting out a nervous chuckle. His father sits, and starts smoking on a pipe. Childe wonders where he got the money, the air between them growing chilled, their breath crystallizing but never combining.
“Hey. Didn’t you just ask for funds for Tonia’s schooling?”
“Yeah. Who’s gonna teach her ‘ow to read, me?!” His father spits on the ground, leaving yellow on the snow. Childe shifts. He’s no stranger to it, but there’s something about the acidic smell of his own father that makes his feet shift uncomfortably. He pushes the old memories out of him.
“Listen, Dad-”
“Peri-”
Ajax flinches. That’s not the name he picked out.
His father reaches for him, the flashbacks over a man too heavy on top of him, intertwining with the scene before him. That hand grabs the edge of his coat before Childe slaps it off.
“Come on, you know damn well you ain’t built like me.”
Childe’s eyes narrow. “Who would want to be? You’re a little small.”
“Wasn’t too fucking small for you, you whore.” His father spits.
Childe wants to throw up. With shaking hands, remembering all the blood he used to clean off of his dresses, he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. In Liyue, the packaging is pretty: with lotuses painted on the front. He shakily brings one to his lips.
His father laughs rowdily. “Look at you, you fucken fag! With your pretty little fags yourself! You always liked putting things in your mouth.”
He’s so startled he drops the cigarette to the ground, having to scoop it up suddenly before someone sees.
His father grabs the back of his hair, which is shorter now, but just long enough to grip the strands. He bobs him a few times obscenely, that laugh carving up Childe’s dreams.
But Childe looks up, making eye contact as he trembles. His hair slides out of the gloved grip, and he stands.
His father stands…and staggers back, lifting his hands like a bar fighter - one near his chin to protect from seizures, and one outstretched to grab whatever he can. A rapist’s stance.
His father, who only now barely comes up to his cheek.
Childe stares down at the stranger, or maybe it’s he who has grown into one. “Keep your fucking filthy hands to yourself, cyka.”
When Childe gets back to his hotel room, he is perhaps not in the mood to see his Cavalry escort - spy - standing in the room, sorting through bandages.
“What the hell did you get up to while I was gone?”
If the smell offends dear Kaeya, he only shows it through a slight wrinkling of his nose. “Just fucked with some guards.”
“Which ones?” Childe’s already turned back, picking a pike off of the fucking wall.
Kaeya looks up finally, shirtless and bandaged around his arm. His jaw drops a little, or it would if he weren’t snacking on cookies. “I-…I got food. Are you goin’ fishing?”
“Yeah,” Childe calls shortly. “Real fast. Gotta catch some недотёпы. I’ll be back.”
“Is that a type of fiff?” *Fish. He means fish. Kaeya is chewing, and accidentally (sort-of) kicks his lambskin flask between the nightstand and the bed, the oil leaving a trail over the hardboard that he sighs at the thought of cleaning.
The mattress creaks as he sits down, and he tries to ignore how wet his riding pants are on the ass - he really did get his ass handed to him. He struggles to pull off his boots.
Childe stares back for a moment, torn between his anger, and the domesticity of a loved one.
He wants to run. To skewer through an eyeball.
But Kaeya is a person. And Kaeya is hurt. And Childe has enough logic, if not humanity, left to turn around and make the choice for who he is going to be.
He walks back over, dropping the pike harshly to the ground (he can only be so nice).
“Why did you stay?”
“Why did you?”
“To watch you.” Kaeya is naked now, except for a loincloth thrown over his lap. He’s beat up worse than he explained. But Childe, for all his flour tone, knew how to spot the bruises.
Kaeya side-eyes the man, who even now is whispering his wrist shut with soft stitches.
“How did you learn to find my injuries?”
“What do you mean? I have eyes. Both of them,” Childe teases.
“One’s glass.”
“Shut up. Dottore worked Real hard to make it move with the muscles.”
“Ah. Your — muscles are broken.”
“Yup. Yours?”
Kaeya lifts his eyepatch, toying with the fabric as he keeps his face turned away. The moonlight is making his face glow, the slant of his nose, the downward curve of his inner eye corner, lined even now with his family’s Kohl. Or is it just his? “Cleaved. It’s more like a cataract now.”
“Can you get it fixed?”
Kaeya loves challenges. He turns his head starkly, like a peacock on alert for the slightest challenge.
“Oh. CLEAVED.” Childe stares, shocked. There’s a literal axe-looking mark inside of Kaeya’s eyeball, cutting away the tissue, or whatever it is. There IS no iris.
“How did it not…fall out? Squish?”
“Cauterized,” Kaeya says, turning away again. He swallows hard. “And…I have a hard time letting go of painful things I once loved.”
“You once loved your eye?”
“No. The scar was smaller, though.”
They sit with that for awhile. A long while. And then Childe remembers something that makes his steady hands shake. “…You have a brother, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Sworn.”
Childe pauses. Snezhnaya and Mondstadt aren’t that different. Except Snezhnaya has an autocrat, and Mondstadt pretends to not be run by nobles and the military.
“…Sworn? You’re vowed to him?”
“For life,” Kaeya replies, not making eye contact. Maybe he can’t; maybe that part of him was cleaved out, too.
Either way, he suddenly rubs his eye, dragging his forearm away from Childe’s ministrations. No more stitches.
Impulsive, Kaeya fiercely bites the ends of the threads, ripping them off. He ties it with one hand, a bit TOO skilled at that. And then takes a bandage and starts wrapping.
Childe, his bloodied hands left dangerously empty and thus wont to violence, stares at nothing but his memories of Mondstadt and family trees.
“So…Diluc?”
“Yes, that is my sworn brothe. My Master of Dawn Winery, whom I serve.”
Childe is staring at a dark-skinned man calling anyone master. He swallows hard. He wonders if he’s overstepping if he assumes things here. He wonders.
“Crepus took me in as a young lad,” Kaeya says, picking up on the tension. “I loved running around the Winery. Always a new place to go, new things to see.”
Childe thinks of his own childhood, borne under an angry man and bleeding into the floorboards in a corner of a room he shared with his siblings, and having to clean it before they’d awake from their whiskey sleeps.
And Kaeya thinks of large hands, and turning his face away. Of a man who loved him more than anything - more than enough to not let him live as a lie.
Kaeya remembers opening his eye wide, and even through the scar seeing the most beautiful flames.
The ice shield fell, and shattered, and broke, and the phoenix died but the sword came through, and caught his eye.
And Diluc didn’t stop, now. Diluc only stopped because Kaeya’s newfound ice blinded him back. Because the icicles stabbed him mid-jump and he fell and broke his arm.
And because two boys became one that night, one mournful entity that could never move on.
“We tried,” Kaeya admits, sighing. Maybe it’s the blood loss, or the firewater mixed with the wine he brought from home. Wine and horilka, gods! Blood and fire.
“But when we undressed, and he saw my eye, he fell back into a nightstand. The lamp fell, and the light went out. He could make fire float, and by the light of it, we saw that a glass shard went…” Kaeya licks his lips, unsure why he’s telling so much. He wonders briefly if he’s violated himself in front of Rosaria and the others, spilling his guts.
Unable to handle it, he keeps going.
“And then?” Childe looks up, watching him with those dark eyes that reflect the stars.
Kaeya wants to live in them, wants to be a legend freed from the hell of being a man.
“He…bled. And I was stuck staring at that little ball of fire he conjured, and wondering if I moved, would he kill me?”
“So you couldn’t have sex.”
Kaeya…falls silent, remembering how his erection had persisted. He had wanted. He had waited.
“Diluc left.”
He still remembers the man turning his back, the clawmarks across them that no one can ever know about, those shoulder blades which once held him close while they moved together.
“It was better this way,” Kaeya murmurs, lifting Childe’s stolen flask to his lips.
Childe, who spiked it himself, heaves a small sigh, rubbing his hand over his face. His money’s delivered to his family. His siblings have reported nothing happening from his too-drunk father. And now…now…there is no home to go home to, but he feels the need.
And Kaeya has nothing to offer him. Mondstadt is just a place, and Childe is a legend. Stars don’t belong in small apartments, they belong in alley puddles singing soldier’s poems.
“I love you,” Kaeya murmurs, but when Childe looks up, it’s just to the bottle in the man’s hand.
The label reads: To live, is to die.
Childe scoffs, and gets up, turning out the light. “Come on. To bed.”