I Just Want Them To Talk.

I just want them to talk.

stop what if

Heizou probably has a habit of accidentally flirting with everyone. Probably you got so fed up with it, you ended up breaking up with him.

Thoma feeling bad that he accidentally spent way more time with Ayaka than he spent time with you.

Childe accidentally hurting you by his excruciatingly big ego, he misunderstands “i’m worried about you” by “you’re not strong”.

Dottore accidentally screaming at you because you disturbed him in an important experiment. Little did he know he forgot you were more important.

Scaramouche keeps denying your love to him after his dark past, people leaving him. You said you weren’t leaving and he doubted it. But now you actually did leave him, all because of him. He regretted it.

Gorou’s loyalty to Her Excellency seemed more important than his love for you, or your love for him. He probably didn’t even notice you left until Kokomi mentioned it.

Diluc gets upset everytime you mentioned about him getting along with Kaeya. He ended up breaking up with you, but he was the dumb one now. It was just a request. Why was he so overdramatic?

Zhongli probably only used you as a coping mechanism, as if you were Guizhong. After you left, he fell inlove with you far too late.

Sometimes Ayato gets overworked. Asking him to rest is difficult. He found you annoying. You left. He misses your annoying personality.

Alhaitham’s suspicious activities.. always trying to find information about the Canned Knowledge Capsule seems to be more prioritized than your well-being to him. Were you just for display?

You hate how Kaeya spends his night in the Tavern than spending time with you. As if he was cheating on you with the Tavern. Ridiculous.

Itto’s personality.. could be a little hard to understand. He never takes things seriously and probably has the biggest ego. He would never take serious discussions.. well.. seriously.

you guys seem to really like this, so here’s a longer version for Scaramouche, Zhongli and Thoma! HERE

i always knew.

synopsis: tighnari has grown to know you. you’ve graduated together and decided to dedicate yourselves to the same things. but, you have plans that  even he cannot know until the last moment. and so, you leave him a letter instead. 

word count: 1.5k warnings: angst with a hopeful ending.

MASTERLIST

A perfect day to disappear is the one that looks like any other. So much so that you are willing to bet that human perceptions of time will not remember it as anything other but ‘simple, normal and quite boring’.  

Yes, this is the day you have been waiting for; up until now you were hiding two letters amongst your books but today – they will finally be utilised and find their rightful recipient.  

One stands in a plain white envelope; no address of either sender or receiver while the other was carefully packaged in a green one with an old dried-up flower. This one too, has no sender but Tighnari’s name is on the other side.  

Keep reading

cyno x gn!reader

“It’s burnt.”

“It’s well-done!”

Cyno levels you with a look that would have had most scholars begging for forgiveness on their knees.

You flick him on the forehead with your spoon.

He grunts when it makes contact, placing his hand over the spot after you move away, acting as if that was enough to hurt him. You roll your eyes, knowing full well he could have avoided it with ease if he so wished.

Ignoring the pouting man beside you (though most people wouldn’t call it pouting, more like frowning and probably planning their demise), you turn back to the steak you cooked earlier—and immediately grimace.

Well… it was kind of burnt.

You try to turn it this way and that with your spoon in the hopes of finding a way to salvage it. It’s blackened to a crisp like someone threw a piece of meat into an open flame and let it sit there for an hour.

You sigh. No homemade dinner for you then.

“Can I choose the restaurant this time?”

“The last time we ate out, you caused such a large commotion that I had to pay the owners for the damage done to their place.”

“They were about to kill that poor sumpter beast for meat! Did you want me to just watch and let that happen?!” You grab his shoulders and shake him as if to put some sense into him. Anyone looking into the scene would have been shocked and baffled at the image of the fearsome General Mahamatra being handled like a ragdoll by an Akademiya drop out like you.

“I would have handled it had you told me.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Do you know how scary your face looks? You would’ve given that poor old couple a heart attack!” You pinch both of his cheeks and pull at them to stretch his lips into smile. He lets you. “There, much better!”

He tries to tell you something but only succeeds in garbling incoherent words and looking rather stupid with the way you’re pulling at his cheeks.

You burst out laughing, letting go of his face and burying your head on his shoulder to muffle your laugh.

“This is no laughing matter,” he grumbles, but you feel the way his heart races when you nuzzle your head closer to him. To really hammer the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, you wrap your arms around him and squeeze as hard as you can.

You know his face looks stoic even when you aren’t looking, but you can feel him soften up against you.

He sighs in defeat. “Fine. You can choose the restaurant.”

Laughing in delight, you pull away to press a chaste kiss on his cheek. “You’re the best!”

“But only for tonight.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“I will not make the same mistake twice.”

“Sure, sure.”

𓆩 ☆ 𓆪 . . 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚 !

𓆩 ★ 𓆪 . . xiao x reader ⁝ wc. 1.2k ⁝ fluff to angst

𝐗𝐈𝐀𝐎 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐘 𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐘 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐘𝐎𝐔, orders given by the geo archon himself.

zhongli saw how his eyes sparkled when he looked at you, when you smile too hard and your eyes crease and crinkle, when you laugh a little too hard at his bluntness and you lean against his chest for support.

it will only end in disaster, zhongli once warned. believe me, i am simply looking out for you.

but what did he know?

xiao wasn't a good person, he was quite aware of that. he was like the moon, he only brought light upon the darkness situations. but you, he thought, you were definitely the sun.

"yeah, that sounds about right," you hummed when he brought it up, earning a tilt of the head and squinted eyes from xiao. 

"what do you mean?" his eyes fluttered when you started to kiss the now visible part of his jaw, before he scrunched his eyebrows and forced them open.

"people can't stand to look at the sun. it's too bright, annoying. the moon is quiet and beautiful," you kissed him on the lips, once, twice, thrice. i love you. you pressed your lips against his gemstone before pulling back to look into his crystalline amber eyes. "do you know how many pray to the moon each and every night, thanking it for it's light and beauty?"

"the moon," he questioned, bringing a hand to not-so subtly cover up his fiery cheeks. "but why not a god?"

you chuckled and cupped his cheek, gently swiping across his freckle as if it were dirt that could be wiped away. "the gods are nothing compared to your beauty, my moon."

"if... if i am your moon, that would make you my sun, no?" xiao swallow a lump in his throat, his heart beating all too quick from him to focus on anything other than your eyes, or hands, or how close you were. unable to focus on anything other than you.

"indeed it does."

xiao kissed his teeth and tore his gaze from you, albeit reluctantly. the glaze lilies suddenly became of interest to him.

if you were his sun, that would mean you were just a measly little star, right? just a burning ball of gas. and he, apparently to you, was the moon. a natural satellite that shined a light upon billions, something people pray to. 

and you're just a star. 

you're so much more than that.

you're so compassionate towards him, not to mention how devoted you are. you're amorous in his eyes, dreamy and unreal. you were an angel, but you weren't. because angels and heaven and a holy cloud space was all fictionalised story to xiao. his life was this, an adeptus. his life was you.

he would say you're perfect, but you aren't. he has seen you lash out, and bark meaningless and empty insults at him only to apologize right after. he has seen you sob and sniffle and bleed. perfection is so quick to bore, he thinks. especially when your imperfections are more beautiful when you show them to him as a whole, when you trust him with all it. all of you.

"you're more than a star." xiao admits on a cloudy night, hands laced together while the scent of rain and qingxin flowers poisons his senses.

"hm?"

"a couple months ago," he coughed into his hand, golden band fading into a mere rusty yellow in the dark of the night. "you said i was your moon and you were my sun. but what is the sun but a star?"

you blinked at him, before creasing your eyes and giggling, your smile widening with every second he looked at you. "you're right. the sun is just a star." 

you sit up and dangle your legs off of qingyun peak, instantly alerting xiao to straighten up next to you. "stars are most beautiful when they explode. they reach the end of their lifetime and burst into this magnificent shockwave of light. it's breathtaking."

"a supernova." xiao recognises. you nod, squeezing his hand a little bit tighter.

"one day i'm gonna explode. and then, it's gonna be absolutely enthralling. fucking angelic, i tell you." you laugh, a sound xiao could and would die happily listening to. "i will be angelic when i die."

mortals die, xiao is more then aware than that. he has had dozens die in his hands, more often than he can count. he isn't always there on time. it's never your fault, you would tell him, and he would agree. he cannot be there for every beck and need liyue has. you taught him that he has concerns and needs, too.

this time, however, was definitely his fault.

just a moment too late, he was. time had slipped through fingers. you had slipped through his fingers.

he could've been quicker. he could've been there. he could've taken the hit. you couldn't. 

a low blow has been taken on you, a harbinger's blade had sliced straight through your stomach. and he was too late. he was to blame.

"no, no no no no no." this couldn't be. his spouse was not leaving him. you could get through this. he'll take you to that one pharmacist, what was his name again? baihua, baizhong? whatever the hell it was.

he was doing everything in his power to save you. he was ripping off articles of clothing from both himself and you, attempting to soak up the blood. your dainty hand grabbed his wrist, shaking. 

"it's okay," no it wasn't. "i'm okay with dying like this. with you." but he was not. he wanted you. he needed you.

he shook his head and drew blood from his lip until iron filled his mouth, choking on his sobs. you nodded in contrast, allowing tears to fall. "it is. because xiao, when you live for somebody, you are prepared to die."

your words were hushed, like a child's secret. like a teenagers first kiss with their highschool sweetheart, vowing to not tell a soul only to gush about it to your friends later.

he was afraid. he didn't want to lose you. he pulled you into a tighter embrace, hugging what was left of you and squeezing the remaining oxygen in your lungs.

"please. i can't. not without you. please, please, please." he sobbed. tears mixed in with the harsh rain that punched at his skull. he was the saddest little baby in all of liyue.

he kept kissing you, savouring your taste even if all he got was blood and salt. you kissed back, light and almost unconscious, like how used to kiss him during early mornings. he watched your eyelids grow heavy and he felt how your body went limp. he squeezed you harder and begged, pleaded, prayed. barbatos, rex lapis, raiden shogun, tsarsita, anybody. not my darling. not my love. not yet.

"i told you so." a disembodied voice spoke,  thick of pity, yet so low and flat. 

the glass broke. xiao sobbed, and screamed into your shoulder. he couldn't breathe. he didn't want to, if it meant he would have to live without you. 

you said it would be fucking angelic when you died. you lied to him, looking straight into his eyes and said it would be enthralling. yet, when he looks at you now, all he can see is the devil's work.

zhongli approached him and hugged him gently, a father's embrace. he was so cold compared to you. you were so warm and welcoming.

you were his sun, but now all you were is a supernova. 

breaking up, breaking down

pairing/s: albedo, childe, diluc, kazuha, scaramouche, xiao, venti, zhongli x gn!reader

summary: if there’s anything you can expect to be consistent in life, it’s that everything has an end. or — genshin men and how they are after you break up with them.

note: angsty in everyone’s part, but it got too lighthearted in childe’s bc i simply cannot take that ginger seriously (affectionate)

ALBEDO

There aren’t any notable changes to his routine. He’d still go about his day, working on his experiments and scribbling down notes, occasionally taking a break to sketch a pretty flower he saw or the wing pattern of a passing butterfly.

And then he finds himself drawing the outline of an eye, then a nose, then lips. Until he suddenly stops in the middle of drawing a strand of your hair blowing in the wind, your face frozen in a smile staring back at him through the canvas of his sketchbook.

It hits him then, the realization, the heart-wrenching clarity of what happened that leaves him sitting in his chair, staring at your face in paper and wondering where he went wrong.

He tries to distract himself by continuing his research, but his mind has a hard time focusing on what needs to be done. It’s agonizing, he doesn’t think he’s felt this way before, never even thought he’d ever feel such pain. In a way, he’s glad his master isn’t here to make a study of what emotional pain means to an artificial human like him.

He sees you two weeks after you broke up with him, laughing as you tried to haggle with a merchant for their wares, unaware of the charm you exude that draws people in like moths to a flame. But then your gaze moves, searching through the crowd—and Albedo should really leave now, avoid barging into your life because there simply isn’t a place for him there anymore—but he does none of that.

Your eyes meet. He doesn’t think he was imagining it when he saw yours dim for the briefest moment. (His heart hurts. Why are you looking at him like that?)

You make your way through the busy street to reach him. He tells himself he should leave, but for the first time in his life, he does what contradicts his logic and stays.

“You look good,” you tell him, something melancholic in the tone of your voice. Oh, if only you knew.

“You as well.” He wants to say more, wants to say how radiant you looked under the sun, the light hitting you in just the right way that has him itching to grab a pencil and immortalize the image in paper—but he holds his tongue. “I need to go.”

Your face falls. He wishes he wasn’t the cause of it. “Ah, right. You must be busy, as usual.” There isn’t a hint of bitterness to your voice, just resignation.

He leaves after bidding you goodbye, feeling the heat of your gaze at his back as he walked away.

CHILDE

He wants you and he will do everything in his power to have you back.

In the early days after you broke up, you won’t hear a word from him. Not a peep. You only hear passing news that dead monsters and hilichurl camps near the vicinity of your home have been utterly eradicated. Passing travelers claim how the areas were ‘strangely flooded’ even though it hasn’t rained in weeks.

Then come the gifts. From flowers to clothes to accessories to different delicacies that are all worth more than your entire life’s paycheck. And when that doesn’t work, Childe sets to work on his recruits.

You suddenly find yourself constantly being approached by a startling amount of Fatui recruits ranging from normal lackies to gunners to cicin mages, and even that one memorable time when a mirror maiden approached you in the middle of buying groceries and proceeded to buy everything in the store, saying all of it was for you.

The Fatui recruits had one thing in common: they all had nothing but praises to say for the Eleventh Fatui Harbinger.

“Master Childe defeated all the recruits in under ten seconds!” “Have you heard how Lord Harbinger killed twenty geovishaps and came out without a single scratch?” “I saw him buying that exact same shirt yesterday, it cost one million mora! He’s so rich!” “Lord Tartaglia has been so down lately. He keeps saying how much he misses his beloved.”

“Did you know? Even Lady Signora wept after she heard that you and Master Childe broke up.” That one, you’re certain never actually happened, and you made sure to tell that with an unimpressed look to the pyro agent who told you. As if Signora would ever cry, she’d probably throw a party for you for finally leaving Childe.

In the end, after cycling through so many recruits, he had no choice but to come to you directly.

…Which is how you woke up at six in the morning to the ground shaking and the sound of an eerily familiar laugh right outside your house.

You open your window to find Childe fighting a lawachurl right in front of your house, a ring of Fatuus surrounding and cheering him on. His smile brightens to an almost comical degree once he sees you and your bedhead squinting out from a window.

“You look so stunning today, beloved!” He steps back from an earth-shattering punch by the lawachurl. “I’ve brought you the biggest lawachurl I could find so I can show you how worthy I am of you!”

He then proceeds to—and you have to blink a few times to see if you’re not hallucinating—fist fight the lawachurl. And he’s actually winning. No vision, no weapon. Just his bare fists.

When the commotion wakes up your entire neighborhood, you have to go down there and yell at him to stop or take this fight somewhere that isn’t right in front of your house! He complies with a grin and a promise saying he’ll meet you later.

There’s something fond curling in your chest that you try and fail to smother. With an exasperated tone, you tell him that yes, you’ll find time in your busy schedule to meet him. He lights up like you just agreed to marry him and yells out rapid orders in Snezhnayan to his recruits.

“I’ll see you later!” He blows a kiss in your direction that you ignore. You turn away and walk back into your house, trying (and failing) to fight the growing smile on your face.

DILUC

It’s not evident to anyone who doesn’t know him well, but Diluc takes it close to heart and buries it among countless other regrets that have accumulated in his life. The turbulent feelings that threaten to overcome his mind at any hour of the day manifests itself in him becoming more withdrawn.

He’s gloomy, more brooding than usual, and the reason becomes apparent once the other patrons notice the lack of a certain person who usually sits by the bar during his shifts. Your usual laugh accompanied by teasing grins and playful swats at his long hair when you think no one is looking are nowhere to be seen.

One particularly drunk person had come up to him as he was wiping down the counters and asked why you weren’t there. Anyone who had been there to see the sight would tell you that he didn’t say anything, hadn’t been able to say anything. He just… stood there, hands frozen mid-motion and eyes drawn somewhere, lost in thought.

He slips up sometimes. Asks the maids to prepare a dinner for two only to stop in the middle of talking as he realizes what he just said. At breakfast, he pauses in the middle of reading his daily papers to turn his head to the right, a question on the tip of his tongue that dies when he sees the empty spot you usually occupied. It’s the pitying gazes that follow when he slips up that he hates the most.

He makes your favorite drink sometimes, on the days when he’s on shift and feeling particularly self-destructive. It stays hidden under the bar counter, hoping against hope that you’ll walk through the door and greet him with an upbeat ‘good evening!’ that makes his day all the more better. You never do.

It’s on a bright, sunny morning when he’s out overseeing the delivery of wine to the tavern that he sees you again. His heart soars for all but a second before it comes crashing down, because Diluc Ragnvindr does not deserve nice things.

You’re holding the hand of some nondescript man, grinning and laughing and emitting such a great sense of contentment that he can almost feel it from where he’s standing meters away from you.

You’re happy. It’s been months and he’s still wallowing in old hurts. You’re happy.

Did you ever smile like that when you were with him? He likes to think so, but the realistic, pessimistic thought is that you’re probably better off not being with him. You’re happy. Happier now than you were when you were with him.

Everything he’s ever loved has been hurt directly and indirectly by his hands. He turns away from the sight of you and pretends to be preoccupied with his task. Maybe it’s for the best that you left before it could happen.

KAZUHA

He tries not to take it to heart. He understands why you left, knows it before you even made the decision to leave. And in the aftermath, much like a leaf adrift in the wind, he roams about aimlessly, lost in thought.

Grief is not an emotion he’s unfamiliar with. As he sits by the cliffs overlooking the endless ocean, grief burrows its way to his chest like an old, unwelcome friend. He doesn’t fight it. He’s learned the hard way that fighting it is a losing battle, like picking at a scab, hoping that doing so will make it heal faster, yet only succeeding in worsening the wound.

Kazuha isn’t a stranger to loneliness, of letting the wind kiss his tears away as they dried on his cheeks. He is, however, unfamiliar with this new kind of ache in his chest. And only after much rumination does he conclude what it might be.

The loss of his family, the loss of his heritage, the loss of his friend, and now, the loss of his lover. A master of loss, he could almost call himself. His old friend would certainly find such a title amusing.

He finds himself writing letters to you, even with the knowledge that he’ll never be able to send them to you. It’s the thought that comforts him, the pretense that he still has someone to tell of his travels, someone to simply come home to, even when he knows he isn’t welcome anymore.

In his weakest moment, when he had too much to drink and too little self-restraint, he sends one of the letters to you. He’s forgotten whether it’s the one where he laments the loss of your presence, the one where he begs you to have him back, or the one where only three words are written, a small blot in the ink where a stray tear had fallen.

He waits, and waits, and waits a little more, staying for a whole month in the small village he’d addressed the letter from for the small, improbable event that you may have written back. He learns later on that the letter never made it to your hands. The ship it had been on had lost all its cargo to the sea, including his letter. When he heard the news, he hadn’t known whether to be relieved or lament on what could have been.

It isn’t unpleasant to see you again. Kazuha has had time to let go of his hurt, but still, the image of your nostalgia-inducing eyes leave in him a sense of loss he thought he had already settled. Your mirage smiles, “Kazuha.” Had he been a weaker man, he would have folded and swept you up in his arms.

Nobody asks why his eyes have a slight sheen to it after he forces himself to walk away from you. He stands atop the beach and lets the waves wash over his bare feet, closing his eyes and imagining what could have been had he let himself succumb to the desire of holding you one last time, even if you were merely a mirage from the past.

Truly, the golden apple archipelago is a place where dreams are made into reality.

SCARAMOUCHE

He tries to act above it all, feigning indifference as if the entire thing is just a mild inconvenience to him.

Oh, you’re leaving him? That’s fine, he doesn’t care. Do you know how many people would kill to share his bed? You were tolerable, a way to pass time. Don’t think you were anything special. You, a normal person? Don’t make him laugh. You were nothing more than a pet he kept because you entertained him. It’s good that you’re leaving, actually. It saves him the trouble of having to get rid of you.

He’s… not very kind about it all. Defensive and on guard, hackles raising with every word that comes out of his mouth. He hates every second of it, but he can’t stop because stopping is to admit defeat, it means having to acknowledge that you meant something to him after hundreds of years of loneliness. He let you in his carefully guarded walls, and now—now you’re leaving him? Abandoning him after he bared himself open to you?

You are just like her.

Scaramouche stops before he can say those last words. The red that had been threatening to overcome his vision slowly recedes, leaving a numbing sort of clarity that washes over him like the rising tides of Inazuma’s beaches. His mouth feels dry, throat closing up.

There are tears streaming down your face.

He wishes you’d do something. Hit him, yell at him, curse his name. Anything. Just… anything but this silence that hangs heavy in the air, cloying in it’s thickness and threatening to drown him with words that can never be taken back.

He doesn’t apologize, won’t ever apologize. He is a god, and not even you would make him say those damnable words. He sees the way your eyes dim in understanding as you realize the same thing, and that, perhaps, is why you turn your back to him and walk away.

He wishes he could say that he called out for you, that he grabbed your arm and made you stay, that he just… held you. Instead, he watches you leave him, face blank and a phantom ache resonating in his hollow chest. The silence after you leave feels like the night before his creator abandoned him.

He tells himself it’s fine, that you’ll come back. You always do. This is just one of many arguments that always get resolved after a day or so—except. Except, he doesn’t let himself think of any other possibility. You’ll come back. (You have to.)

The months following your absence is a blur, spikes of irritation mixed with hateful words and barbed insults directed towards anyone who so much as breathed the wrong way. His subordinates are half-contemplating desertion just to escape his wrath. They all wonder where you’ve gone. You’re usually the one who soothes the Balladeer when he’s in one of his moods, like the godsend that you are. Though none of them are brave enough to mention your name after what he did to the foolish recruit who asked of your whereabouts.

Years pass. You never did come back.

He still gets the occasional reports about you and your general wellbeing, still sends out his best soldiers to clear out any monsters who’ve settled near your home. You never find anyone else after him. It brings a strange sense of relief in him when his monthly reports on you end up without a hint of a new lover.

He tries to forget you, but even with a new heart and the ascendance to godhood, there is still a lingering sense of loss and past regrets.

XIAO

He lets you go without argument. He’s used to people leaving him, but this is… different.

The thought of you there, physically within reach yet unable to to cross the distance that separates you from him. It’s a different kind of agony from the ones that have afflicted him for millennia.

He sometimes finds himself standing by the balcony of Wangshu Inn, eyes roaming over the vast landscape of Dihua Marsh, looking for the slightest hint of your silhouette. The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs always attracts his attention, anticipating your signature greeting and the smell of whatever mortal sustenance you’ve deigned to make for him to, as you once put it, let him experience the delicacies that this world has to offer.

You can’t call yourself ‘having lived a long life’ if you haven’t tried all the tasty food, Xiao!

…He misses you, though he will never admit it, perhaps not even to Rex Lapis himself.

His time—which once consisted of you, killing monsters, you again, roaming the lands for the remains of old gods, tasting whatever you cooked for him, and accompanying you so you can get home safely—is now comprised of nothing but endless slaughter. He tells himself it’s not a distraction, but it’s a thinly veiled excuse, weak even to his own ears. How low he has fallen to create such feeble excuses to justify the hurt that spreads from his chest to the tips of his fingers.

He used to pick up small things and trinkets in his time scouring the land for evil. A shiny pebble that reminded him of your eyes, a particularly large sweetflower that you would gape comically at once he showed you, qingxin flowers he plucked from the highest mountains just so he can see the way your face lights up in a smile. He still does all these things, only now, the objects are stored in a realm made in the likeness of your home, placing each one in a shelf or table that he thinks you would have arranged them in.

One time, he panics when he sees the flowers start to wilt, and in the heat of the moment, he placed adeptal power in them to ensure they will never die. To this day, he isn’t sure why he did so, only that he imagined at the time how upset you would be that they died in his care, even though he knows how unlikely it is that you will ever discover his hobby of collecting flowers and storing them in his realm.

Perhaps he hopes you’ll come back to him, so that when you do, he can see the way your eyes brighten up once he shows you everything he got for you while you were away.

It’s unlikely, he knows, but it’s nice to dream of it. He thinks his siblings would be proud to see him finally have a little hope for something.

VENTI

He spends the rest of the week in the tavern drinking as much as he can. For once, Diluc doesn’t try to reproach him for drinking what he can’t pay for.

He doesn’t exactly get drunk—can’t get drunk, more like. To a god like him, drinking a hundred barrels of Mondstadt’s finest wines won’t even be enough to get him tipsy. He is the god of freedom (and wine, he’d like to add), he can outdrink every single one of the archons and still have enough semblance to go to war. And yet…

You appear on the seventh day like a salvation, face contorted in worry when you see him slumped on the counter and one inch away from falling off the stool. It isn’t difficult to act the part of a drunken bard, pretending to sway on his feet and donning a fake intoxicated grin as he asked Charles for another glass.

The wind tells him of your arrival, but he ignores it just as he ignores the way his heart soars when the wind brings him the barest hint of your scent. He wishes you didn’t come here. He wishes he didn’t act so drunkenly. He wishes you were more heartless and ignored whoever must have tattled on him drinking Angel’s Share into bankruptcy.

You call his name. He pretends he’s asleep just so he doesn’t have to face his problems. Ha. How ironic. Will he wake up to Mondstadt destroyed by the remains of Khaenri’ah this time? He nearly did once.

He hears you sigh before he feels you bring his arm across your shoulders. You help him get off the stool, an arm around his waist to help keep him steady. The weight of Diluc’s disapproving gaze for deceiving you about his drunkenness is heavy, but he tells himself it’s alright. He just… wants to be selfish for once. If he has to act drunk to feel your arms around him again, he’ll suffer this humiliation as many times as he can.

“Venti,” you start as you walk him in the direction of your home. “I was worried, you know. Aether told me how much you’d been drinking since…” You trail off. He feels you shaking your head before continuing, “Just… don’t be so reckless with your health.” You laugh, mildly sardonic that’s directed more towards yourself than him. “Ah, what am I saying… you won’t even have any recollection of this tomorrow anyway.”

He wants to say something, but saying something means breaking this moment between you, it means revealing that he doesn’t actually need your help because once he starts speaking, the dam will break and everything will come spilling out. I’m sorry, I miss you, I love you.

The front door to your house opens. He’s gently placed down your couch, a blanket thrown over him as you thoughtfully take his shoes off for him. He feels you linger by his side, can practically hear the conflict in you.

He’s unprepared for the feeling of your warm breath on his skin, your lips hovering over his face before placing a chaste kiss on his forehead. “Goodnight, Venti.”

He leaves before the sun rises.

ZHONGLI

He only smiles, small and understanding with a hint of sorrow at the corner of his eyes.

He tells you he’ll respect your decision, but should you change your mind, he will always be here. You say it’s doubtful, he would’ve probably found someone else by then. Zhongli doesn’t correct you, only leans in and places his lips on the top of your head, as gentle as he’s always been with you, somehow managing to convey with a single gesture how high he holds you in regard.

And for the barest, infinitesimal moment, you half-contemplate the idea of staying. It’s a wishful thought. You end up leaving before you can change your mind.

He’s still as grounded as ever, but there’s a fragility to it, a certain brittleness that threatens to crumble from within him. He is the Lord of Geo, and yet he is so easily undone by you. The pain is temporary, he knows from past losses, but it doesn’t lessen the ache that resonates in his chest.

For the first time in his long life, he curses his golden memory that makes him incapable of forgetting, though that which he curses is also something he is grateful for. He can’t bear having to suffer losing the memories of your time together.

Your relationship is amiable, like that of old, awkward friends you had fallen out of touch with rather than that of old lovers. It’s what you wanted after all, this sense of normalcy. He has become such a vital part of your daily life that you simply couldn’t cut him off of your life entirely.

He doesn’t know which is worse; having to act as a mere friend when he wants nothing more than to wrap you in his arms and never let go, or to have no contact with you at all.

Morax is not one to ask for things, not one to plead his case to anyone. He was a selfish and proud god, a necessity that was shaped from him by the war. To love a mortal enough to leave his throne and fake his death would have been unthinkable. But that is why he is no longer Morax. He is Zhongli.

And Zhongli? He wants you. Desperately. Enough that he is willing to beg should you ask it of him.

His deceased enemies would laugh in mockery at what has become of the fearsome Morax. How low he has fallen—but it is a burden he is willing to bear. He will suffer as many humiliations as it takes to have you back.

The only issue is that you don’t want him anymore. But he is a man who finds gold where others would see stone. If he has to build his way up from friendship all over again, then it is a task he will do so gladly. As many times as it takes for you to want him back.