Chapter Text
“Twigs and blackbirds, snow and red horses, the ghosts floating up, the snow falling down — the detective is weeping — and the black coat. Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
― Richard Siken, The Worm King’s Lullaby
~**~
Childe had a complicated relationship with time.
Ajax was a relatively normal child, if a little shy. Overcast, snow flurry days were spent in the sole schoolhouse in Morepesok, one room, one teacher, and all the town’s children. Ajax did his sums and practiced his grammar. Competed with Mitya and Zenya to throw wadded up paper at Pasha without him knowing. Played koldunchiki with the other village children after asking Big Sister Viktoria to ask them if he could play. Waved streamers and little sparklers on their trip to the city, sitting on Big Brother Aleksander’s shoulders. Cheered the marching Fatui troops and celebrated the five hundredth year of the Tsaritsa’s reign. Helped his Papa saw a hole in thick ice and reel in the catch of the day on Lake Rybak.
A young boy, Ajax would collapse into a snowbank on the lake, bemoaning how long this is taking, Papa, why do we have to wait here for fish when Dedulya Vitya sells themmm! Paapaa! He’d tug on the fishing line, poke the water with the fishing spear, begging fish to bite. His father would huff a gruff laugh, pat a heavy hand on Ajax’s ushanka-covered head, and say Patience, dear Yashechka.
His Mama told him that patience was a virtue. Yasha, be patient, she would say, whacking his fingers with a ladle as he tried to sneak an early dessert. Yasha, wait!, she would yell over blustering snow as Ajax ran out half-dressed into a flurry, eager to build the biggest most impressive snowman ever. Patience was a virtue, but Ajax never had the time. Every day went by so fast. He was the baby brother, and then he was an older brother to a younger sister and then a younger brother and then another brother. Time went by so quickly, but Ajax enjoyed every second of his childhood.
It was ripped away from him at fourteen.
His birthday was last week. Pasha’s dad was a merchant and got him a dull shortsword from the city. Ajax just wanted to test it out in the forest. He didn’t want anyone seeing him struggle holding it. He was going to be the best fighter in Morepesok!
He just wanted to use his new sword.
He just wanted to play.
He just wanted…
The Abyss doesn’t care about things as pathetic as ‘wants’.
Ruinous temples and toppled idolatry litter the shadowed void. Memories of a civilisation long destroyed now littered with evils no Snezhnayan storyteller could ever capture. With blood streaming down his forehead, ginger hair turned matted crimson, and a dull shortsword, the little boy could do nothing but hide under stonework ruins and choke on his tears.
Sleep did not provide a reprieve from the horror; piercing wails and screams inhabited his dreams, unconsciousness becoming only a second battlefield, where waking up cold, alone, and afraid was the best circumstance possible. Ajax spent days running, just running. From disembodied voices screeching ancient curses, from snarling wolf-like creatures, from jeering monsters lobbing scorching flames, from hunger, from thirst, from sore feet and aching joints and throbbing wounds and broken bones and bleeding ears and—
And then she came.
She was the most terrifying person he could ever imagine meeting. Hair like a starry night, skin like granite, claws and fangs and glowing eyes and Ajax was terrified. Skirk. Get up, boy. Her name was Skirk. Follow or die, boy. His saviour.
He hid behind rocks covered in acid and watched this omen of devastation eviscerate rifthounds with jagged swords. Cried as jeering Pyro Mages burned his flesh, nerves fried with Lector’s Electro strikes, but she pulled him to his feet. Gave him a jagged dagger and watched as Ajax screamed as he tore a Herald’s armour from its body, ripping into its miasma, turning to her and grinning while covered in its ichor. Skirk didn’t smile but nodded. She took back her weapon, ripped two swords from the hands of the corpse, and tossed them to Ajax. These will do, boy.
Skirk was relentless, unforgiving. She was so kind. She taught him patience. How to lie in wait, as still as death, hiding from an insurmountable enemy or laying the trap for a foolish one. How the skin a rifthound whelp for its protective hide, to cut around necrotic tissue to get at the gamey flesh able to be eaten. How to cook without the fire drawing the ire of roaming lectors. How to build shelter, how to step silently, how to kill. How to slit Mage’s throats, how to pierce Herald’s armour into flesh, how to choke non-existent air out of the lungs of Shadowy Husks. He stole their blades and mastered their art. He became an omen on the landscape beside his master. Betting the inhabitants of this terrifying land to challenge him. The voices whispered, tiny needles in his eardrums, to be better, to be stronger, to dominate these foolish creatures who think they can possibly compare to him—
She taught him how to listen to the voices. Focus, boy. She would say. Consume their power. Keep your mind but steal their senses.
Encased in a carapace of darkness, with a cloak of stars and claws of granite, Ajax was powerful. A sweep of his hand and he felt the snap of a rifthound’s spine. Elemental attacks scraped past his armour and he didn’t even feel their heat. The strength of the Abyss was a heady concoction of safety and destruction. He was powerful. When a falling rock echoed across a chasm, it was him the denizens of the Abyss were afraid of. Beside his master, he could dominate. He could survive.
Three years, or what he could estimate were ‘years’ in an eternal darkness, went by in the same way.
Sleep. Eat. Kill.
Kill. Eat. Sleep.
Survive. Improve. Destroy.
Until the Abyss spat him out. A nauseating taste on its tongue, Ajax was easy prey It consumed until he was not. Until he became poison It swallowed and regurgitated into the snow. Even Ajax doesn’t remember how he returned to his small little fishing village.
All that he remembered was a wet snout nosing at his cheek and yipping in his ear. Ajax’s eyes opened to a late dusk and lack of wounds or hard-earned scars. Pink and orange hues painted the sky. Powdery white snow gently covered his tunic, lovingly embroidered by his mother. He launched himself up, ready for an attack. Beady black eyes stared back at his hazy blue. A small orange fox stared at Ajax, head tilted.
His vision blurred and the world seemed to darken.
“AJAX!”
With a shrill yip, the fox darted away, leaping into the tundra shrub as shouts began to draw near. Specks of light danced between the branches of the evergreens. Lanterns. The light glimmered off something buried in the snow. He dusted the snowflakes from it. A blue gem encased in an angular silver casing.
“He’s over here!”
A Vision?
“We found him!”
It hummed in his palm, glowing faintly.
“Quick! Quick!”
His nose was numb.
“Somebody get Lyudmila! We’ve found her boy!”
Hands grabbed at him, wrapping his body in something. Voices spilled over one another, but he couldn’t hear a single word. Ajax was unconscious before the sun set kissed the horizon.
The boy that woke up was not the same one that left. Of course, on the outside he was the same. Maybe a little frostbitten from the elements, but altogether the same. Some short legs. Squeaky voice. Three years of growth, vanished in an instant.
He was fourteen again.
Little Ajax returned a violent teenager shackled to the body of his prepubescence. An adolescent who had the muscle memory but not the muscle. A face that spoke of happier times, hands used to making bread not massacre, and a mind not poisoned by the putrid pandemonium of the Abyss.
He clutched his Vision, kept in hidden in his jacket layers whenever he ventured outside, but everyone was already whispering about that ginger boy’s supposed blessing. It was a small village. People stared at anything but him as he sauntered through the market. Do you really think he got one? Whispers buzzed as soon as they thought he was out of earshot (he never was). What is it? Tsaritsa protect us, he’s a frightening child. He smiles as he fights. One of the older boys, a friend of Big Brother Nikias’ maybe, called him an attention seeking little rat.
Morepesok quickly learnt that his Vision was Hydro.
He tried to go ice fishing with his father. Patience was a virtue, but he was stronger than some fish. After five minutes of waiting for a bite, Ajax snarled and pelted a spear at a dark shape in the water. He pulled up a massive flailing Snowstrider and turned to grin at his father.
Papa wasn’t good at hiding his fear.
Mitya, Zenya, and Pasha never wanted to spend time with him anymore. They did their sums in silence, while Ajax stared at the chalkboard. What did simple sums and grammar matter when he had been fighting for his life only a month ago? None of this mattered. The whispers of the Abyss, like a zephyr of cruel miasma, circled his mind, begging him to consume, to consume…
Tonia came home crying. She said a boy had put dirt down her dress and called her a mean name. Big Brother Ajax said he would handle it.
Grisha Nevashev had to be taken to the capital for treatment. Viktoria wasn’t sure he would make it.
She told him that the day they went to town. His big sister stood in the square with him, her healer’s coat drawn closed against the biting cold, as Father spoke with the Fatui agents stationed at the recruitment centre. Only Ajax had any bags. She kissed his cheek and urged their father to say goodbye as Ajax joined a half-full cart of would-be Fatui twice his age, destined for the capital.
He never did say goodbye, but then again, neither did Ajax.
Next year he will have been in the Fatui for a decade. Ten years of service to the Glorious and Noble Tsaritsa of Snezhnaya, Cryo Archon, Glacial Goddess, Heiress of the Hoarfrost, Diamond of the North.
Childe had a complicated relationship with time.
He lost three years of his life to the Abyss. He lost his boyhood to whispers of violence. He lost his young adulthood to becoming a weapon of war for his monarch.
Childe had a complicated relationship with time.
Staring out at the golden sunset over Liyue Harbour, Childe sat in the grass of Mount Tianheng. The sea breeze didn’t make it this far, but it was better that it didn’t. Would probably remind him too much of home. A few days ago, he might have dared to call Liyue Harbour home in his mind (never out loud). The bustling streets, the beautiful scenery. His loyal underlings, no longer fearful of the bloodthirsty Eleventh Harbinger Tartaglia, but exasperated at young Master Childe loudly bemoaning his boredom. Merchants who knew his name, who kept their best wares just for you, come, come, have a look. Dock children who knew his approach meant hours of fun and any street snacks they could possibly ask for. Xiansheng, a scholarly gentleman, imposing but not frightening. Distant but not inattentive. Calculative but not malicious. Maybe one of the most interesting and handsome men Childe had ever had the pleasure of knowing. Of countless dinners and market trips and historical hikes and maybe a kiss if Childe wasn’t hesitant for the first time since returning from That Place.
But even that stung now. The city below him was recovering, rebuilding from flood and storm and all of it Childe’s doing
Zhongli’s deception stung so much more.
If only they had more time. Would the god have told him? Was he even that important?
Childe did not have much time. He was Tartaglia, Vanguard of the Tsaritsa, he knew it would be a miracle if he reached thirty.
And soon, he would leave Liyue Harbour and all its baggage behind.
Just, not how he imagined he would.