Work Text:
The rain over Mondstadt looks different in the dawn.
Pale gold spills in scattered rays against the smudged, fogged windows of the horse-drawn carriage, and she pulls her knees a little closer to her chest. The glass is cold to the touch as she reaches out, leaving a blurry fingerprint against the surface.
It’s a faint mark, half-lodged and barely visible. The sun smears a quiet warmth across the lands amidst the falling droplets but she doesn’t feel it at all. The summer skies are crying, dark and honeyed with the promise of more downpours, and the gold is fading away into grey, sunlight dimming into a lethargic deluge of cloud.
The idea of escaping these long, rain-drenched days should be one filling her with relief, excitement even, but there is a part of her heart that sits heavy in her chest, stripped of warmth and filled only with an emptiness she can’t seem to put a name to.
“Miss?” She startles at the voice from the front calling her, lowering her legs slowly until her feet are touching the floor of the wagon again. “We’ll be there soon.”
She presses her lips together, casting her gaze back out of the window. Now the scenery has shifted away from the rocky outcrops of Mondstadt’s borders to the tall stone formations marking Liyue’s unique topography, and beyond the dawn mist she sees the faint lights in the distance, blinking and blurring in the falling rain.
It’s not running away, she thinks as the carriage pulls to a halt outside an inn. The smell of flowers and rain on the pavement intermixes with the fresh air as the driver pulls the door open and she takes it in with a wavering breath, eyes tracing the unfamiliar lands. Just a short visit, a temporary stay.
Mondstadt has been peaceful as of late; the Knights would suffice fine without their captain on their regular patrols. She’s only going to be gone a few days, anyway, not long enough to matter. A part of her wonders if they’ll even notice that she’s gone.
If they did, the civilians certainly wouldn’t mind her absence, anyway.
The thought brings a wry smile to her lips, a not-so-fond reminder of her reason for departing to the land she’d been meaning to visit for a while now. But it’s not running away, she repeats in her head as she steps off the carriage and pays the driver his fare, it’s just a short visit. A temporary stay, not long enough to matter.
The driver bids her farewell and she shuts the door behind her, water droplets shaking loose from the sill of the window and drawing patterns across the back of her hand. The rays of sun in the post-dawn light peek through the rain-smeared glass, past the half-smudged fingerprint and onto the empty seats.
She steps back, and the wagon begins to move off again, making a sharp turn along the road and heading back in the direction it had come from, back toward the dark summers and rolling plains and dandelions in the breeze. Back home.
Home. The word is a strange one. Where is home? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever know.
The weather in Liyue is warmer, the rain less merciless. She checks into the inn and tosses her bag onto the bed. She hadn’t brought much with her; only enough to last a few days, maybe more if she decided to shop for clothes and other necessities once she got to the city. But she’s not intending to stay that long, anyway.
She strips the clothes off her body and steps into the shower. The heater hasn’t been switched on for long and the water is still cold as it runs over her body but she doesn’t mind. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling, anyway.
She stays that way for a while, washing the rain out of her hair and the scent of the dandelion-kissed breeze off her skin, until the water pressure starts to dwindle and she begins to realise just how long she’s been standing there.
Goosebumps trail down her body as she switches the water off and wraps a towel around herself, but she’s not in a rush to change into a new set of clothes; the cold doesn’t affect her that much. Instead, she wanders to the other end of the (not-so-large) bathroom to where the mirror lies above the sink.
The mirror is slightly clouded from her shower, and the reflection that stares back at her in the glass is blurry and unfamiliar, wide eyes searching for answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask and lips half-parted to contain all the words she can’t bring herself to say.
She reaches out and swipes a palm over the glass, clearing the condensation away. Now the surface is clear but the person in the mirror still doesn’t look like her. She looks confused, lost almost, standing with water dripping down her hair and across her face like tears, towel wrapped tightly around her frame as though holding her together for where she herself cannot.
Standing here like this, she feels a little stupid. She’d escaped to Liyue for a short getaway to quell the strange, unsettled feeling in her heart, to maybe somehow find the pieces of her to fill that odd emptiness in her. She’d thought that maybe if she’d gone to a different nation—maybe the one her old mentor had once called home so fondly—she’d be able to learn a little about all the things she’d wanted to. Belonging. But she feels nothing at all.
A sigh escapes her mouth, impatient and bordering on the edge of frustration, and she reaches out again to draw a thumb across the mirror, leaving a large smudge down the middle of her reflection. This isn’t it at all.
She pats herself dry and throws on a fresh set of clothes, the fabric soft against her skin. It’s a nice change from the Knights’ uniform, and a nicer change still from the overly-formal attire the others from her Clan would wear to parade around town putting on their insufferable airs. She’s not worn it since the day she’d received it as a gift—it’s a rare occasion that she’s out of her armour, really.
Maybe it would’ve been more of a regular one had the shopkeepers been willing to actually sell her clothes. But who would want a descendant of a depraved dynasty to parade around wearing their brand on her sleeve?
The day is still young, but she decides to leave her journey to the city for the following dawn. She had checked into this inn for one night, anyways—it would be a waste of money to just leave now. Maybe just this once, she’ll lie here and listen to the sound of birds and leaves fluttering in the wind, and maybe just this once she’ll close her eyes for a bit and forget about the world.
It’s rare that she’s indoors, rarer still that she has time to spare. Most of her waking hours are spent patrolling the areas of Mondstadt, the rest spent training prospective Knights. The rest of the members on her patrol teams had always been eager to return home after the end of the day, unlike her; she wonders if it would have been different for her had she had a home to return to.
Belonging. She doesn’t know what she’ll find here in an unfamiliar city away from the one she’s lived in all her life but she thinks that maybe—even if it’s not everything she’s been looking for—it’ll be better, somehow. Just maybe.
It’s not running away, she promises, closing her eyes shut to the lullaby of birds outside the window, just a temporary break.
She’s gotten tired of being herself in that city.
She doesn’t know when she drifts off to sleep, but she must have at some point, for she dreams of winter skies and her breath fogging in the air and her fingers, shorter and stubbier, closing around the fur coat round her mother’s shoulders.
She dreams of frozen gazes, words holding icicles, fingers clinging to unwelcoming hands and then being pried away. She dreams of a house with a blazing fireplace that does nothing to warm away the ice on her skin and over her heart and she dreams of a place half-forgotten in the recesses of her memory, tucked away into a corner she never thought she’d discover again.
She awakens to cold sweat down her back and palms clutching at empty air. The evening light spills dark lilac into the room and against the white of the bedsheets, and she jerks upright, ignoring the slight ache that shoots through her back at the movement.
The silence that settles within the four walls is haunting, like all the ghosts she’d thought dead in her memory, like the scars threaded in invisible string over the sewn-together pieces of her heart. She stumbles out of bed, making her way to where her bag had been discarded onto the floor at some point during her sleep, picking it up and slinging it over her shoulder.
She doesn’t wait for the evening to end, for the night to pass. The wasted money takes a backseat on her list of concerns as she hands the key back with hands that won’t stop shaking and half-trips, half-walks down the stairs of the inn until she’s on the road, the ground hard but uneven beneath her feet.
And somewhere, in some distant, distracted part of her mind, she thinks she is running away.
Away from the houses that don’t feel like home and the cities stripped of warmth and the benevolent breeze that brings only whispers cursing her name. Away from the name she can’t seem to remove from hers and the chains she can’t get off her wrist and the countless smudged reflections of her from the days she’d tried so desperately to find herself in the looking glass.
She feels like she’s been drowning all her life, suffocating in the murmurs that follow in every footstep she takes, head under the waters of the tears the city’s ancestors had once shed because of the blood in her veins, hands outstretched but with no one to take hold of them.
What’s a little running if it’s for some fresh air?
The road from the inn to the city is long, but the distance she covers isn’t one she’s unused to. A little while after the sun has sunken beyond the horizon and encased the sky in an envelope of dark she settles down by the empty roadside, seeking shelter beneath a rocky overhang.
It’s easy to fall back into the pattern of hunting, even when visibility is poor; her movements are swift and precise, and it doesn’t take her long to strike up a makeshift fire. She had once been forced to do so every day after all, back when the merchants in Mondstadt had refused to even sell her the most basic of groceries—if anything, it’s as practised a skill as her Clan’s dances by now.
The meat tastes dry, or maybe she just doesn’t have an appetite. It’s a little different from how it’d tasted back in Mondstadt, but she doesn’t mind. Liyue isn’t a place she’d expected to suit her likings, anyway.
And what’s worse, she wonders: to belong in a place that doesn’t feel anything like home, or to not belong at all?
She finishes off the rest of her meal and cleans up before heading to bed; she falls asleep to the sound of a drizzle overhead and fallen leaves being swept up in the wind. The next day she awakens before the sun rises and continues in the direction of the city, footsteps light against the road.
It’s a long journey, but she prefers it this way. The pain that’s beginning to sting her calves takes her mind off the thoughts building like an ache in her head, and strangely enough, it’s a nice reminder, somehow. That she’s actually going somewhere. A destination to go to.
(Whether or not they want her there is a story for another time; she supposes she’ll find out soon.)
The guards by the city gates regard her with scepticism, but they don’t bar her from entering once she reveals her affiliation with the Knights of Favonius. She isn’t too worried about the possibility that they may actually contact the Knights to make sure she isn’t a fraud of some form—by now Jean would’ve probably noticed her absence, anyway. Might as well give her some peace of mind by letting her know of her location.
She doubts they’d spare manpower just to convince her to come back, anyway. It’s not like she’d defected—she’d be back within a few days. She’s not the closest to the rest of the Knights, but she’s confident that they know that, at least.
The city is large, far larger than what she’s used to, and the streets aglow with lights painted a different shade of gold than what she’s accustomed to seeing. As she walks, gazes turn to her direction, following her every step, but this time they are burning with curiosity, not hostility.
She thinks she can live with that.
“Miss! You there—” Her footsteps slow as she hears a voice. “You, the one from Mondstadt!”
She comes to a gradual halt and turns, widened eyes boring into the merchant’s cheerful ones. He seems to pay no mind to the surprise scrawled all over her expression, raising a hand to wave her over instead. “Come on over here! We’ve got the best Grilled Tiger Fish—I can give you twenty per cent off the first buy, if you’d like! You won’t regret it, I promise—come on over!”
She complies. It’s an odd feeling, making her way over, seeing the grin wide on his face as he hands the snack over.
It’s the first time a merchant’s ever invited her to patronise their store before.
And maybe the smile on his face isn’t genuine and maybe the hands that stretch out to accept the coins she lowers into them aren’t warm but she thinks that maybe she can live with this.
And it’s funny, she thinks, taking a bite of the snack and savouring the flavour on her tongue, how she feels more like she belongs in a place that doesn’t even know her name.
“Miss—” She startles, feeling a tug on her sleeve, turning to see a boy beaming up at her. He’s only a little kid, maybe eight or so, maybe younger. She clears her throat, a tad awkwardly, attempting a smile in his direction.
“What’s the matter?” she asks, crouching so her eye level is more even with his own. She can’t remember the last time she’d spoken to a child; all of the ones in Mondstadt avoided her like the plague, fed with half-truths from their mothers and mouths ripe with insults lying between their fathers’ teeth.
“You don’t like you’re from around here,” he says, and she hides a flinch. But his statement is phrased innocently, his eyes round with questions and not scorn, and she can’t find it in herself to put him at fault.
The smile settles on her face, more natural now in the fading city lights. “I came from Mondstadt. It’s near to Liyue, but definitely not as big.”
“What’s it like?” he demands. “Is the weather good? What does it look like? Are the people nice?”
She falls silent in contemplation, eyebrows furrowing at the questions. “I suppose so,” she says. “The weather is sunny most of the time, but every now and then—like now—we have pretty heavy thunderstorms. It’s—”
She combs through the Mondstadt she knows in her mind, grassy plains and faraway glows of the Anemo Archon’s statue, winding lakes and the flicker of hilichurl fires amidst the foliage.
The layout of the city itself remains an almost embarrassing blur in the recesses of her memory. She supposes she’d been too busy avoiding everyone’s gazes to focus on where her own fell.
“It’s very green. There’s a lot of grass and water, and there are less rocks and mountains than Liyue. Oh, but there’s a big, snowy mountain nearby. It’s called Dragonspine, and it’s very cold, but very pretty.” The corners of her lips twitch upwards a little higher at the thought. She’s always been fond of Dragonspine, even with the less-than-ideal conditions and the bitter bite of everwinter; the scenery is breathtaking, and the ice baths the perfect place to unwind after a long day.
Bonus points for the fact that there isn’t ever anyone around up in those snowy peaks.
“As for the people…” Now her smile sits less certainly on her face. “They are nice, I suppose.”
It isn’t a lie, not technically. She’s seen how kind the citizens of Mondstadt have treated others—from the admiration in their gaze every time the Grand Master walked past to the grins lighting up the storekeepers’ faces each time Amber paid them a visit to the children playing on the streets checking up on each other every time they’d stumble and fall.
“Oh, I see.” The boy nods his head vigorously at her descriptions. “That sounds like a cool place! I want to go sometime. It’s not that green out here, but in the city we have this really big harbour, and it’s so pretty. If you haven’t seen it before, you should definitely go sometime! I would take you there if I could, but—”
“A Fei [1]! ” She blinks at the sound of a woman’s voice cutting through the air, and the boy before her freezes for a moment before he laughs.
His tone is apologetic as he speaks to her again, but his eyes bright. “I’m sorry, my mother is calling me. I have to go home now, but maybe I’ll see you again!”
She nods in farewell, watching as he gives her a half-bow and runs into his mother’s waiting embrace, noting the grin on his face that glows in the evening light and the words that wouldn’t stop falling out of his lips to his mother’s listening ears.
Home.
The bittersweet feeling in her heart blooms and then fades, throbbing away into a duller ache, sitting somewhere in the spaces between her soul in a place too familiar to hurt any more and too unfamiliar to hurt any less.
She ends up paying a visit to the harbour, long after the little boy returns home, long after the merchants shut down their stores, long after the streets empty out and the warm orange lights behind drawn curtains flicker out into the promise of sleep-filled nights.
There are no ships on the harbour tonight. The sea after dark is an expanse of blue dipping away into hazy shades of grey, the waves free and unbound as they lap against the surface, and a part of her wishes she could be like them too.
She stares down at the waters. The tide rolls in gently and then retreats, and she wonders for a moment what would happen if she’d dared to follow it. Today the distance they chase feels like the unknown, like the half-lidded promise of something wonderful, like home. The waves fall back into the crest of the sea and she watches as the reflection of her wavers and then dissipates.
The breeze picks up, and the seafoam in flecks against her lips taste like the salt of her tears. Something in her heart wilts and dies with the coming and going of the waves, filling the space between her bones with the burning of a fractured soul. She reaches out with hands that never quite felt like hers, searching and desperate.
It’s funny, she thinks, something’s missing, still. She’d come all the way here in some odd attempt to find some part of herself, to trace back her footsteps to a place that had existed in her old mentor’s memory before she had. She supposes some part of her thought that maybe—just maybe—the one person who had understood her would have left some part of him behind in this city he used to call home, some part of him that she’d somehow come across, some part of him that would feel a little like home again.
She cradles the bone whistle in her hands and holds it under the pale moonlight. It had been a gift from that same mentor of hers, an instrument that originated from this same land. She’d play it atop snowy mountaintops on nights that she’d miss him, listening to the sound of the sea ringing out about her, and she thinks that maybe if she plays it here, now, maybe it’ll feel right.
The notes seep into the empty night, low and sorrowful and blending into the cry of the ocean spray. And here, like this, in the city he had told her so much about, the lullaby on the bone whistle sounds just like it had when he’d played it for her, and yet it doesn’t feel like home. There are only pleas in her mouth where there should be melodies and scars in the places where there was once love.
She doesn’t know if she’ll ever understand what it means to belong again. A part of her wonders if she actually wants to know what it means again.
What’s better, she asks herself: to be outcast from the start, or to be found and then lost again?
Now that she’s lived through both, she realises she doesn’t know the answer.
There is an ache deep in her heart where she cannot reach, spilling through her veins like liquid gold, and everything is a blur from the tears that flow like the lullabies through the night, the world smudged and hazy like dark summer skies as she thinks of all the things she’s not allowed herself to think about before.
She misses feeling like she’d belonged somewhere, and she supposes somewhere along the way she’d gone missing in her search for that somewhere. It’s not something she’s ever admitted to herself—not consciously, at least—and she thinks that perhaps with how often she’d acted like she didn’t care about how the people of Mondstadt looked upon her she’d managed to delude herself into not caring, too.
Home. She’ll have to go back to Mondstadt soon. Jean would probably give her an earful for shirking her responsibility, maybe force her into doing those boring admin jobs she’d always hated as punishment for leaving without warning. She doesn’t think she’ll mind, though, staying indoors on her own. Drawing smudges against her reflection in the window and watching the world pass by.
She’d joined the Knights to find the traces of him—of the closest thing to home—but it hadn’t been enough. And now she’d come all the way to his hometown, too, to see the city with her own two eyes, play lullabies on the bone whistle out to sea and pray that maybe he’s out there somewhere listening.
But she can’t seem to find what she’s been looking for. Maybe she isn’t looking hard enough. Maybe there wasn’t anything to be found in the first place.
Maybe she was never meant to be found. Maybe all the pieces of her had been scattered with his leaving, like a ship lost from harbour, wrecked along a coast of an undiscovered island, cries for help ringing unheard like these lullabies.
“Eula.”
The sound of her name is jarring in a place like this, and the melodies halt abruptly. Her vision clears and tears itself away from the waves and she holds the bone whistle to her chest as she turns her head, eyes widened and confused.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Amber says, and something in Eula’s throat burns.
Standing there like that, illuminated in the barely-there glow of the after dark lights, the smile in her eyes looks just like that of her grandfather’s.
A little like home, Eula thinks distantly, and the tears that spring to her eyes come in a rush.
She presses her lips together, turning back to the rolling waves. Amber doesn’t ask, coming instead to stand next to her. The breeze caresses their silhouettes and Eula embraces the silence that follows. Amber has always been good at that—hearing all the words she doesn’t say aloud.
They stay like that for a while, until even the moonlight sinks behind the clouds and the waters still. She looks down and sees her reflection in the waves, hers and Amber’s, and they remind her of how they’d use to go to the frozen lakes of Dragonspine, laughing in a space where no one could hear them.
“I didn’t run away,” she blurts, all of a sudden. “I’m just—passing through for a bit. I’ll be going back soon.”
She wonders if the Knights of Favonius had sent Amber to find her.
“I know,” Amber says simply, and Eula tilts her head to look at her. Amber’s looking up at the night sky like there’s something to be found amidst the stars. “I didn’t come to take you back.”
Eula swallows. “Oh,” is all she can say, her gaze dropping back down to the sea.
“I just didn’t want you to be alone,” Amber confesses, and the breath leaves Eula’s lungs in a rush.
And then she smiles, if not a little sadly. “I’m used to it. Being alone, I mean.”
In the distance, she thinks she sees the faintest silhouette of a ship out at sea. It must be coming to the harbour at dawn. She wonders how many ships had gotten lost on their way home, how many there are stranded out in the ocean waiting to be found again.
“But you don’t have to,” Amber says, and Eula looks back over to see her eyebrows all knitted together, an odd frown playing on her lips as she gazes up at Eula with an expression she can’t fully make sense of. “You don’t have to be alone. I’m right here. I always was.”
The smile that blossoms across Eula’s face is a soft one. “I know.” Amber had been one of the few—the only, really, after her grandfather had left—to treat her without any regard for the blood running through her veins; the only one to speak proudly of her achievements as though they were her own, the only one to smile at her in the winking afternoon light and the only one to stand by her side in the freezing cold of the snow-kissed mountaintops. “But—”
She realises what she had been about to say and clamps her mouth shut, turning her face away.
The corners of Amber’s eyes crinkle. “But I’m not him?”
Eula draws a shaky breath, watching as Amber casts her gaze back up to the sky, tracing constellations with the gold of her eyes. “I miss him too, you know. He’s the one who gave me my dream, after all. Home hasn’t felt the same without him.”
Eula makes a small, strangled noise at the back of her throat. But what if home was him? she wants to ask, but she can’t bring herself to.
Amber understands anyway.
(She always does.)
“Eula,” she says, softly, “you can let other people in too, you know.”
She swallows. Hard. And then, barely audible, half-lost in the sound of the sea that surrounds them: “I don’t want to replace him.”
It feels a bit like letting go, and her eyes follow the ship that makes a U-turn away from the harbour and heads back in the opposite direction, chasing the horizon. She doesn’t want to, no matter how stubborn she must seem. She doesn’t want to find a home in someone else, not when there’s only one place that ever made her feel like she belonged. The tiles are all wrong and the cement doesn’t contain the pieces of her that she’d lost with him and she can’t seem to let her walls come down.
This time, it’s Amber’s turn to make an odd noise, mixed between disbelief and bewilderment. “Eula,” she says, and then a little more insistently, “Eula.”
Eula forces herself to meet Amber’s gaze. Amber is staring up at her with an expression she can’t read scrawled all over her features, lips trembling with unspoken words and forehead creased in thought.
“You’re not replacing him by letting anyone else in,” she whispers, her voice cracking a little. Before them, the waves crash against the surface and the seafoam on their lips taste a little saltier than they had before. “The past—the past doesn’t change itself just because you start living for the present, Eula. You can have more than one person in your heart.”
Amber reaches up and Eula watches as she places her hand over her own heart. “He is and will always be the most important person to me,” she says, her eyes earnest, and Eula finds nothing but the truth within. “But we’re friends, aren’t we? You’re right here, too, right here in my heart. Right next to him.”
Eula’s vision blurs and she blinks the tears away. The revelation is a startling one, and she draws a breath, raising her own hand to the left side of her chest where her heartbeat thrums to life.
The ship in the distance fades into the night, returning to the harbour from which it had come, but it crosses paths with another, this time headed directly for the city, and Eula feels her heart beat a little faster.
Amber’s right. She’s not replacing him by allowing herself to let other people in. Belonging isn’t static and maybe what was meant to be found had been here all along, in the little corner of her heart she’d left locked away from the present.
She’s still the same ship, sailing along the same seas, just with different harbours.
“I’ll be by your side whenever you need me,” Amber says firmly, and the way she says it sounds a little like a promise, and the warmth blooming to life in the splinters between her soul a little like continued beginnings, like stories re-written, like belonging.
Amber reaches out and takes Eula’s hand in hers, and Eula presses her fingers against the skin on Amber’s palms, a smudged fingerprint down the middle, but this time it feels less like running away and more like coming home.
She lifts her gaze from the unfurling tide to the stars in the sky, smiling down on the harbour. “Amber,” she asks, “do you want to hear a tune?”
This time the lullabies on the bone whistle that whisper into the listening night are gentle and thrumming with a soft hum, reverberating to the harmonies of the ocean spray. And here, like this, in the city that he had told them both so much about, the notes feel just like home. There is love blossoming in the cracks between the scars threaded over her heart and promises in the corners of her mouth alongside the melodies that echo the sound of the sea.
And the breeze over the harbour is cold, but she hasn’t felt this warm in years.