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There are few things in Teyvat that move quicker than news. It spreads from man to man even faster than disease, and Baizhu knows better than most how effective that is.
Nod Krai feels different than Liyue and all it takes is stepping off the boat to tell as much. The nation holds itself with a different energy–kuuvahki, his research has told him–and the landscape is full of ramshackle buildings assembled by riveting spare metal together. It’s a city that sprawls and builds upon itself, and doubles back once it hits a wall, heedless of the layers that have emerged from this process. He wouldn’t call it a pretty city, but it is certainly a feat of human determination and ingenuity. It’s nothing at all like the neat rows of Liyue Harbour; from here, there are no mountains that disrupt the horizon, and the city is lit by neons flickering rather than lanterns (it’s something wholly different from Sumeru City as well, but those memories are older and more complicated to consider).
Changsheng curls closer around his neck, making her distaste for the colder climate clear; unsurprising, given she’s cold blooded. Qiqi has both of her arms full of luggage and supplies, one of the tails of his coat tucked between her arm and the box, because she doesn’t have a spare hand to hold it.
The news had all been clear enough: ready each nation’s defences, be careful, be cautious, the world only might end—and only if their ever valiant hero doesn’t save them all. Which they have. Now, Baizhu knows, it’s time for the clean up, which is where he comes in. He holds the letter up once more, checking the map it had come with to figure out how to get to the small building that has, temporarily, been requisitioned as a clinic.
They find themselves settling into a new (or, more accurately, semi-new and spatially distinct) routine easily enough. For the first few days, Baizhu had accompanied Qiqi on her walks, spiraling further and further from Nasha Town, to give both of them a sense of the environment and what’s there. There’s the normal, expected plants that grow everywhere on the continent, and some that he’s never seen before. As far as he knows, none of them are actively poisonous, and so he sets Qiqi to collect any of the ones she can find, and to help anyone who seems hurt to the clinic.
This process works perfectly, and he has enough frostlamp flowers and winter icelea to begin experimenting with them. While he’s been able to find a bit of information on their medical properties, he prefers to be able to use them in tandem with his own recipes; he’d be lying if the research and experimentation doesn’t feel like being a student again. An endless, eclectic stream of people, either those injured in the evacuation or those who couldn’t and remained in Nod Krai during it, have come to him for help.
No, the real problem comes on an innocuous afternoon when Qiqi arrives several hours before he expects her.
Baizhu looks up as soon as the door closes, setting down the herbs he’s sorting. Qiqi is half carrying, half dragging Il Dottore, second of the Fatui Harbingers, and presumed dead man behind her. The body, at present, doesn’t appear to be beating the allegations, but he knows better than to assume. He blinks, and Changsheng rouses momentarily on his shoulders before seemingly deciding to go back to sleep. If only he could do the same.
“Doctor Baizhu,” Qiqi says, dropping the man to the floor. “New patient,”
“Is he…still alive?”
Qiqi nods, and holds up Dottore’s arm. “I checked his pulse you like showed me,”
“Good girl, Qiqi,” Baizhu says, already feeling the start of a migraine taking up space in his temples. It’s going to be a long, long few weeks. “Did anyone see you?” He asks. Ideally, he won’t have the inhabitants of Nasha Town storming the door of the clinic because he’s harbouring the mostly–even if, according to Qiqi, not entirely–dead harbinger who tried his best to ascend to godhood and destroy the world while he was at it. She shakes her head, and he lets out a relieved sigh. Small mercies of being on the outskirts of the city. “Well, I suspect this is something we won’t be telling the Traveller.”
He waves a hand towards the back. “Why don’t you get him set up in the back room and I’ll be there in a moment?"
She picks him up again, and disappears into the room behind them. Baizhu watches for a minute, and rubs his temples, allowing himself to a count of fifteen, and then to sixty when fifteen does nothing, to ready himself for what he is certain will be ensuing trouble.
Generally speaking since his arrival, his relationship with the Frostmoon Scions has been good. Their moonchanter, Lady Lauma, had been nothing but helpful. It is, afterall, her library where most of his research materials have come from. However, he suspects that all might come to an end if they find out about the comatose would-be moon god in his back room.
His wounds are washed and dressed, and at this point, there’s little else that Baizhu can do except wait and see if he wakes up. Without his mask, he looks, almost, peaceful. Under the bed, a box that’s been hastily labelled ‘glaze lily stamens’ stores his personal effects, in case anyone sees and starts to ask questions Baizhu doesn’t want to answer, even if he could in a way that wouldn’t seem incriminating.
He glances over periodically, noticing as the figure begins to stir. “You’re awake,” he says. “Don’t try and sit up,” he adds a second later, as his words are, summarily disregarded entirely. As he watches, Dottore tries, winces, and immediately falls back against the pillows.
Baizhu crosses the small space that separates them to sit down on the edge of the bed. “Hello, Zandik,” he says, and Dottore; bleary, groggy, vulnerable–and Baizhu knows how much he must hate that–stares at him for a long moment before the recognition hits.
“I’m surprised you aren’t dead,” he says, bypassing polite greetings. Straight to the point, just as Baizhu remembers him.
Baizhu laughs, resting his chin on a half-curled hand. “No thanks to you, but I rather think your own continued survival owes something to me.” Dottore bares his teeth, and Baizhu can’t help but think it’s just like a cornered animal. “Now then, don’t be ill at ease. I didn’t save your life just to kill you once you woke up,”
Dottore lets out a scoff—Baizhu isn’t fool enough to think it’s a laugh. “Are you so honorable as to spare a dying man, Baizhu?”
“No.” Baizhu answers simply, smiling darkly. “It would have saved me the supplies to just have killed you when Qiqi brought you in,”
“Is it about your oath then?”
“You weren’t my patient then, but still no,”
Again, Dottore tries to sit up, and despite the clenched muscles of determination, Baizhu can tell he’s in pain, and so it’s no more successful than it was moments ago. By rights, he probably should be dead–anyone else would be. If he had to hazard a guess, at least part of the reason he isn’t is because of the remnants of the moon’s power. Short lived as his godhood may have been, Dottore did, even if he created his own authority to manage it, touch the divine. He always had been overly ambitious and brilliant, and despite it all, part of Baizhu is glad he is alive, and certainly impressed by the display.
He reaches out for the cup on the table, passing it to Dottore. “Drink this,” he says.
“I’m-“
“Still unable to sit up. Drink,”
Dottore looks at the tea with narrowed eyes. “What is it?”
“A painkiller,” he answers.
“I don’t want to be-”
“Drowsy, I know,” Baizhu remembers that much from the Akademiya. Neither of them slept as much as they probably should have, and Dottore even less than him, Baizhu isn’t certain he ever saw Zandik sleep. “I’m trying out new formulations, it shouldn’t make you tired,” he offers after a brief hesitation. Still suspicious, but seemingly at least a little mollified, Dottore obeys.
Baizhu returns to his chair, and tries, at least nominally, to do some work before Dottore speaks again. He’s not asleep, which Baizhu takes as a point in favour of the new medication. He’ll have to test it more robustly of course, Dottore hardly makes for an accurate data point, but it seems to have worked well enough that he’d levered himself to a somewhat upright position.
“Do you intend to keep me here like a prisoner?” Dottore asks. “A lab rat, perhaps?”
“No,” Baizhu says, outwardly mildly amused and wholly unaffected by Dottore’s ire. “But I do want to know what you plan to do,”
“I’ll return to Snezhnaya.”
“Where they will surely want to try you on some sort of charge of treason?” Pointedly, Baizhu doesn’t mention or think about how saving Dottore could technically count towards his own charge of it. “I doubt you’ll be welcomed the way you hope,” he says. “Why don’t you come to Liyue with me?”
“And why, pray tell, would I do that?”
“Because I suspect you don’t actually want, or care about Snezhnaya,” or the Fatui, Baizhu doesn’t add. “I think you want the funding that the Fatui provide, and,” he says, leaning forward. “You can send a letter to Pantalone, and we know he will oh so generously continue to provide it under the guise of coconut milk for Qiqi,” He leans back, crossing one leg over the other. He’ll just add money laundering with the Fatui to his list of crimes, it’s not like their current agreement has never raised questions before. “Not to mention there’s more than enough unoccupied space for you to make yourself a lab where no one will recognize you,” he adds, smirking.
Dottore grimaces, but he seems to be actively contemplating what Baizhu said, and so he takes it as a victory nonetheless.
Dottore recovers slowly, but given that the average person would be unable to because they never would have survived it, then not at such a snail’s pace. He chafes at being confined to the clinic, but as anyone sane would want him dead if they were to realize that he isn’t, then it seems the sensible precaution. They work well beside each other, they always have.
Perhaps too easily.
As the number of patients dwindles, he assumes, to whatever the numbers were before and a sense of normalcy, or whatever new version of it passes for it, reasserts itself, then it’s easier to be taken in by Dottore. He’s no less charming now than he was when they were students. They debate until long into the night:ethical quandaries that they have never agreed upon, methodological problems, unsolved variables. Dottore asks about his search for immortality, Baizhu questions their long years apart. His eyes linger on Dottore’s lips, the curve of his fingers on a bottle, the warm press of a palm against his waist.
It’s really only a matter of time before they fall into Baizhu’s bed, rather than the smaller, medical one that Dottore has been relegated to. There’s something that might be a kiss, and might be a bite against his neck, one that Baizhu returns in kind. It makes its way down his body, and Baizhu leans into the heat, the passion, the pleasure.
Baizhu thinks he should probably be more upset, or more guilty over the fact that the first time they’ve slept together, that it’s now. It’s been many long years since Dottore’s expulsion, and subsequent rise and fall. At least if it were then, Baizhu could fool himself into believing he doesn’t know exactly what sort of man Dottore is, here, he has no such excuse. But he can’t quite bring himself to care, either.
When, eventually, he sleeps, they do so in the same bed.
Herbalist Gui expects many things from Doctor Baizhu’s trip abroad. Boxes full of herbs, papers, letters, maybe even a few local odds and ends. And those he does get! Qiqi comes in with her arms full of boxes looking no different than the day they departed for Nod Krai.
What he doesn’t expect is the man who comes in with them, carrying a box of… glaze lily stamens? He squints, double decking that he read the box correctly. Gui could swear that Doctor Baizhu didn’t pack any for the trip, and he certainly wouldn’t have picked any there.
The man’s eyes land on him, and Gui straightens instinctually, abandoning his questions about the box. He’s handsome, in an intimidating, unsettling way. Meanwhile Qiqi and the doctor both look as blithe as anything, and Changsheng looks displeased, but Gui can’t yet say if that’s from the man or simply the whole trip.
“Ah, Gui,” the doctor says, following a step behind the man, and smiles as soon as he sees him. “How nice to be home, and I’m so glad to see that the pharmacy doesn’t seem to have burned down in my absence,”
Gui forces an awkward laugh, and nods. “I’m not as good as you, sir, but I like knowing I can manage that much,” should he ask about the…
“Zandik, darling,” Baizhu says, looking away from Gui. “You can put the stamens in my room,”
Zandik, as he’s evidently named, vanishes into the back of the pharmacy following Qiqi, just as Baizhu returns his attention to him. “He was a patient,” he offers by way of explanation. “Who I decided, at least for the time being, would make an excellent research partner.”
For a flicker of a thought, Gui debates asking any of the countless questions Zandik’s appearance raises. There’s a look in Baizhu’s eye that he doesn’t trust, and a lightness to him Gui doesn’t think he’s ever seen, before deciding against it. He likes this job, and if Doctor Baizhu wants to bring strange men from would-be doomsday nations home, then Gui figures that can be his prerogative. “Feel free to take the rest of the afternoon off, Gui. You’ve done a marvelous job these part few weeks,”
Gui bows politely instead of questioning, or kicking the gifthorse, and only lets his gaze linger on the door, and on Baizhu’s fond expression, before hurrying away from the pharmacy without a backwards glance.