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«A Martingale is a betting management strategy in gambling where the player increases bets until they get a win. Despite the apparent guarantee that this strategy always leads to a win, the martingale does not give the player an advantage.»
“What’s the problem?” Tartaglia asked after Zhongli dismissed his perfect ten-year plan—to overthrow Celestia, gift Zhongli a mitachurl fur coat, whisk him away to Snezhnaya, and maybe, just maybe, get Skirk to at least acknowledge his existence during their rare encounters. At the very least, see her again.
Zhongli frowned like a man who had just heard a dozen unacceptable things and was now deciding which offended him most. Tartaglia, whose interactions with Zhongli were governed by three childhood morals — don’t argue with elders, don’t argue with immortals, and, above all, don’t argue with those you can’t out-argue — had already conceded before even starting.
"Fine, fine, no mitachurl fur," he said with a wink. "I’ll bring you a trophy from Celestia instead."
Zhongli’s expression twisted. Tartaglia wiggled his fingers with playful bloodlust, as if tracing the edges of angelic teeth on a pendant. If Zhongli wanted something else — a sculpture, a bone dagger — he’d bring that instead. But no requests came. "He clams up at the mention of Celestia, just like I did with my father," Tartaglia had realized once, and ever since, he’d been trying to pry the damn box open.
"We’ve discussed this," Zhongli replied.
The box remained stubbornly shut, creaking — whether from displeasure, age, or simply for the sake of it. For all Tartaglia's talents, he lacked one: reading people who didn’t want to be read. Or Archons — he saw little difference. Zhongli never shared stories about that part of himself, neither the sorrows nor the joys, leaving it all unspoken: I’ll tell you what I can. You’re a clever boy — figure out the rest.
"I’ll flip this island upside down and drop it into the sea," Tartaglia vowed, the same way he promised his family he’d return alive. Zhongli wasn’t his family — he was more, the heart of him, the part not devoured by the Abyss, drowned in his mother’s tears, or pledged to his homeland. Until Zhongli claimed that part of him as his own, Tartaglia hadn't even known such a part existed. "And you’ll tell me everything."
Zhongli shrugged, and Tartaglia couldn’t tell if it was agreement, mockery, unease, or disappointment. He wasn’t a clever boy, after all — and it infuriated him.
***
As Pulcinella had once put it in his usual know-it-all way, Fontaine was almost identical to Snezhnaya. The two nations were locked in a race for technological supremacy, each nipping at the other’s heels and vying for the title of Teyvat’s most beautiful capital. Powerful, married men in both Snezhnaya and Fontaine kept mistresses. Tartaglia had seen it a thousand times and long since stopped caring. But in Fontaine, every mistress seemed to have three of her own, which threw his worldview off balance. Both nations revered water, though in different ways: the Snezhnayans fretted over every unfrozen spring as if it were a premature baby fighting for life, while the Fontainians searched among the coral for the best underwater views, as if looking for the next cover star.
Truth be told, Tartaglia hadn’t come to Fontaine on leave — his feet had simply carried him here, and one day (though he’d have sworn he’d been talking to someone else entirely) he was chatting with some creature aboard an aquabus. The voice of that creature and another from the depths shared one unnerving trait: neither belonged to a human. That common thread was enough for Tartaglia to convince himself he’d imagined it all. The rest was just a matter of habit: when his father sent him off to the army, Tartaglia called it "leaving home of my own accord". Now he was on leave and had already wasted half of it trying to remember what had brought him here in the first place.
"Quite the diva, eh?" said some man at the bar, and Tartaglia didn’t immediately grasp his meaning. The sheer abundance of frilled skirts, sharp-angled hats, and utterly pointless buttons-cuffs-ruffles on every local had long since overwhelmed him. Tartaglia had made a habit of judging important people by their weapons, but as he’d learned, ordinary onlookers paid attention to entirely different details.
The mademoiselle carried a microphone instead of a sword, with a slit in her dress running all the way up her thigh. Her voice? Fine for background noise, but the choir of the Zapolyarny Palace wouldn't accept her.
The man snorted.
"You’re a weird one, pal."
Tartaglia was ready to fight for his tastes — well, he’d fight for anything, anytime — but his own irritability was starting to unsettle even him. He shook his head and moved his hand away from the dagger strapped to his thigh.
Still, he couldn’t find much to praise in the girl, nor muster even half-hearted agreement. His own diva, unlike Fontaine’s fleeting stars, was in a league of her own: first, she commanded the adoration of the masses (and later, a funeral to match it); second, she had a voice of godlike power, though Tartaglia never actually heard her sing. She’d wave him off, muttering, “That’s all in the past now.”
Instead of a microphone, she carried a spear. The lack of a thigh slit was disappointing, but hardly a dealbreaker.
"A Liyue lady?" the man cut in when Tartaglia briefly outlined what locals might call "his type". "Word is, they’re perfect wives in public, but behind closed doors? Whew."
Tartaglia wasn’t sure what whew implied, but remembering how similar Fontaine was to Snezhnaya, he mentally swapped the rolling pin for the pillars that pinned Osial to the ocean floor and nodded half-heartedly in agreement.
***
"Who is Ajax?" Zhongli once asked, and Tartaglia laughed.
Tartaglia cherished his friendship with Zhongli. The meticulous consultant fit him like two puzzle pieces that slot together, filling in each other’s gaps: Tartaglia’s lack of fluency in the Liyue language, the distrust of the locals, the simple desire to be heard. Rumors claimed nobody won arguments against Zhongli — he handled conversations like a seasoned dancer leading a waltz. But outsiders misunderstood; his true skill lay in listening. He had enough stories to last another few hundred years, yet they were all about heroic deeds, towering cliffs and fallen enemies. He never shared tales of childhood adventures: secret caves where he'd hide with friends, or bamboo-stalk duels. Nor did anyone dare ask, as if knowing silence would be their only answer.
Except Tartaglia. Tartaglia told him about wooden spoons in Snezhnaya, the arm he broke as a child sledding downhill, and how Pulcinella once made him rewrite the Fatui’s military code all night as punishment. Zhongli never felt the urge to interrupt or steer the conversation toward the distant past. He would have gladly traded every future debate with Liyue’s refined scholars just to learn how many years Ajax had spent in silence, drinking hot chocolate with three sugars, before mustering the courage to confess to his mother that he didn’t actually like sweets.
"Ajax," Tartaglia repeated with a scoff. "A third son who sneaked reads of his mother’s books and was terrified of the Frost Serpent — the one that etches patterns on the windows of children who misbehave. Ugh, you wouldn’t have liked him, Mr. Zhongli. Or rather… me. I was a coward."
"Some mistake cowardice for prudence," Zhongli replied gently, unable to suppress a smile. "Ajax." The name settled on his tongue, soft and warm.
Tartaglia snorted.
"My life was nothing but endless snowdrifts and firewood. I was nobody — a spoiled, dull middle child who would never head the family, just leave eventually but remain in the same village. I hated hunting and was terrible at making ice holes. Father said I had weak arms."
As he finished, Tartaglia glanced at Zhongli — only to find him studying his hands. Suddenly self-conscious, he regretted not wearing long sleeves. Under that gaze, he felt the absurd need to justify not just his hands, but even the dragon he’d once killed and boasted about. Had Zhongli looked at him disapprovingly then? Or had he imagined it?
Tartaglia sighed, recalling the polite smile Zhongli wore whenever he bragged about his exploits. Tartaglia longed to impress him, but the task felt as futile as earning a "well done" from his father. Ajax’s father had never been proud of him. His mother had fretted endlessly. And those Tartaglia most wanted to amaze only ever seemed wearied by his feats of valor.
"Maybe," he muttered reluctantly, "I’m still boring now — just in a different way."
Zhongli, who had never pressed silk flowers leaves to a child’s scraped knee or known how to mend a broken heart, simply covered Tartaglia’s hand with his own in silence.
***
"A certain lady once told me a tale of a hero not of this world," Zhongli mused, pressing a kiss to Tartaglia's knee. "His mother dipped him as an infant into a chalice that granted immortality. But she held him by the heel, and that heel remained his only weakness, the very spot through which death found him."
Tartaglia smirked, nearly catching Zhongli's jaw with his knee.
"A crude little fable about everyone having a weak point."
"More a lesson on the inevitability of fate," Zhongli countered, pinning Tartaglia's leg to the blanket to keep him from fidgeting. "The mother had been foretold that her son would either live a long, unremarkable life or die a hero in the dawn of his youth. She immersed him in the chalice, hoping to make him invulnerable to sorrow and grant him a quiet existence, yet in doing so, she only hastened his death."
"If I knew no blade could strike me down, I wouldn't waste my days sitting by the hearth either."
"Precisely." Zhongli's eyes shimmered with memories of bygone eras, lands, peoples, and heroes. Tartaglia stared unblinking into those diamond-shaped pupils but saw no reflection of himself, only echoes of memories that were not his own. Would anyone, gazing into Zhongli's eyes centuries later, catch a glimpse of Ajax? Zhongli blinked first, breaking the contact, and continued: "Had she not granted her son immortality, he might have grown up fearing his own shadow. Her love led to his death. The very spot touched by a mother's hand became his destruction."
"Like I said," Tartaglia repeated. "A story about everyone having a weak point."
"All heroes are alike," Zhongli said softly. "And you too." Tartaglia puffed out his cheeks and exhaled sharply through his nose. "Your parents blame themselves for not loving you enough, and you ran away from home. But would a child raised without love ever yearn to become a hero?"
Tartaglia shrugged, struggling, as always, to keep his head above the tide of Zhongli's endless musings. The hardest moments came when the conversation turned to him — childhood memories dragged him under like the thick snow outside his old home.
"Another's love gives the strength to wield a sword, but it cannot shield, and always leaves its mark." Zhongli traced the curve of Tartaglia's foot, fingertips gliding in a smooth motion. "What's your heel, Ajax?"
***
"It's for horses," Zhongli remarked as Tartaglia slapped the whip down on his desk at Wangsheng Funeral Parlor and stared at him expectantly. The last time Tartaglia had come to seek his attention, Zhongli had been inspecting coffin upholstery. One thing he knew for certain: Tartaglia had no sense of timing, place, or appropriateness.
"So what?" Tartaglia shrugged, disappointed but not offended. He probably wore the same resigned look as when his father caught him trying to take three candies instead of two. Eventually, Tartaglia gave in under Zhongli’s stern gaze. "Fine, then you choose," he said, grinning at Zhongli’s raised eyebrows.
Zhongli was amazed by Tartaglia's confidence that he would never be denied anything. Sometimes Zhongli felt like refusing him as a joke, just to see confusion flash in those eyes. But trust was more important than momentary whims—Tartaglia was a fragile boy, even if he’d never admit it. Zhongli saw right through his pompous bravado and shameless theatrics, yet saw no reason to chastise him.
***
The woman looked old, but — and this was why Tartaglia felt a shiver of unease, so certain was he of it — she was not, in truth, old. It was not merely the wrinkles, though they were there, etched precisely upon her brow and at the corners of her eyes. They seemed like makeup, as if this woman had never truly aged in the human way, but had simply woken up one morning already like this. Her heavy, hooded lids drooped, veiling iris and pupil, leaving only a pale, pinkish-white sliver of eyeball visible. Even that disappeared as she shook her head, and her face vanished behind a curtain of stringy grey hair.
"I can tell your fortune, young man," offered the crone.
Tartaglia refused at first. Then, his curiosity piqued, he agreed, extending his palm even though he put no stock in predictions. He had met real witches. Not one of them would dare trouble the heavens merely to learn the fate of a stranger.
But there was something wrong with this woman. She sat on that bench as if she remembered a time before a single pier had graced the Harbor. Tartaglia could easily imagine a bygone era when magical beasts roamed Liyue and pressed their muzzles into her palm, seeking a gentle touch.
"Not your fate," the crone said slowly, releasing his gloved hand as if she were loath to believe what she had seen. "This life you lead now — it is not your fate. It is a counterfeit, and it leads you to ruin…"
"I am aware of that," Tartaglia smiled. "I take care of myself."
She sighed — or so he assumed. He couldn't see her face, but adults usually reacted to him in just that way.
"Your life was meant to be different. You were meant to have a family, children. The girl next door had a fondness for you, though you never noticed. She is probably still waiting for you. Beautiful, gentle, like a… what do they call it in Snezhnaya? A Snegurochka?"
"I have everything I want," Tartaglia replied with an easy smile, though inwardly he felt a sharp pang of longing to leave. After his return from the Abyss, his family had dragged him to countless fortune tellers and healers, but none of them had ever truly cared. The sheer audacity of this woman triggered a strange sense of deja vu: she spoke of him as if she were the grandmother he never knew, someone who, alongside his mother, had cried her eyes out during those three dark days.
Tartaglia clasped his hands together, rubbing them absently. Only then did he realize the crone had never removed his glove for the reading. Skirk's words echoed in his mind: those truly capable of seeing fate had no need to touch bare skin. An unpleasant sensation coiled through his muscles.
"You walk a path not meant for you," the crone said, her tone so achingly familiar — it was the very same inflection that Ajax's mother used when she told him to mind his scarf and be careful. Suddenly, Tartaglia understood: this was no ordinary fortune teller. She did not deal in mora. She dealt, or hoped to deal, in the promise that her prophecy would be fulfilled. "People are fragile. They need a home. You do too. And… what happened to you, it was never meant to be."
He shivered inexplicably as a sudden, raw vulnerability washed over him, but he dismissed it before he could fully register the feeling.
"Well then," Tartaglia said, abruptly pressing a few coins into her palm, strangely desperate to settle the debt. As if, by not paying her at least a single Mora, she might claim something far more precious—not his life, but the life he had chosen, the one he would never trade. "See you next time, grandmother. Let's hope your prediction doesn't interfere with my plans to travel all of Teyvat."
"I hope you find your home, young man," the crone said, shaking her head. Her hair scattered in all directions, her eyelids fluttering open, and then Tartaglia saw her eyes: gleaming gold in the darkness. "To wander is the lot of immortals, not of men."
***
Binding Tartaglia’s hands was a futile endeavor, really — he could always turn into a monster and tear through any rope, even those woven from bamboo fibers and horsehair. The gesture was more symbolic than practical, a ritual of pretend submission.
Zhongli had no need to spend nights tangled in lips, hands, and limbs; for him, any bedroom affair was merely a set of necessary actions, a way to show closeness and give pleasure. But he enjoyed teaching, demonstrating, explaining. Helping — even though he was never asked for tenderness. Tartaglia could sense pitying affection from a mile away and avoided it like the plague, immediately switching to "come near me and I’ll kill you" mode. And his back arched far more readily under the lash of a whip than under the press of a kiss between his shoulder blades.
"I have no interest in weak people," Tartaglia would declare in their conversations, and Zhongli would silently finish the thought for him: "I need someone stronger than me." Tartaglia would have argued if he’d heard, so Zhongli kept the observation to himself. That was their unspoken agreement: Zhongli wouldn’t voice what Tartaglia refused to hear, and in return, Tartaglia would listen to what was actually said.
Tartaglia felt the heavy shadow looming over him, Zhongli’s fingers slipping beneath his collar, pressing against his throat as if Tartaglia were some rabid dog to be restrained. But Tartaglia was no dog, he was far worse, barely even human — something far more terrifying. And he wanted to prove it: he jerked his legs, kicked out, testing whether Zhongli was strong enough to deserve him. The test passed successfully. Zhongli pinned him to the bed again, bit him three times for good measure. Tartaglia settled into the pillow with a muffled growl.
Zhongli radiated power from a mile away — it spilled over, soaking into the sheets, seeping into Tartaglia's very skin, transforming him momentarily into something greater than human. That was why Tartaglia kept coming back to him. Maybe even why he loved him: for the chance to feel like what he had never become — omnipotent, fearless, immortal.
Zhongli stroked Tartaglia as though shaping clay on a potter’s wheel, pinching away imperfections before reaching inside to stretch and mold him. Tartaglia arched obediently, let out something between a gasp and a moan, squeezed his eyes shut, allowed himself to be consumed and finally felt full, alive, complete.
***
Tartaglia always strikes up a conversation with strangers, laughs at the way men's legs go weak at the sight of monsters, and claims he leads a simple, easy life. Zhongli never believes him for a moment: Tartaglia's friendliness could only fool someone who had never met a truly closed-off person.
Zhongli knew little of Ajax's past in the Abyss, but enough to draw his own conclusions. Tartaglia had no inclination for long reminiscence or introspection, which struck Zhongli as strange and wrong. Tartaglia's method of coping with any pain was as simple as the man himself — shove it deep inside so it would not seep through his skin and betray him. Zhongli wished he could help Tartaglia, but Tartaglia had no use for an outstretched hand.
"Great heroes must have great sorrows," said the voice — but it was not Zhongli who sat in that tiny Wangsheng Funeral Parlor room and had never laid eyes on a single hero; this was Morax speaking, the one at whose feet all heroes laid their deeds, hoping for an Archon's acknowledgment, or at least the touch of his hand.
Tartaglia, without knowing why, suddenly bristled and was about to protest aloud, but Zhongli continued:
"Otherwise, half their valor would go unnoticed."
Their eyes met, and Tartaglia went still: Zhongli's gaze was as gentle as his voice; his eyes held no judgment like the other Harbingers', no approval like the Tsaritsa's. They reminded him of his mother's eyes, or Tonia's — eyes that knew something had happened, but also knew that he — the middle son, so arrogant toward the defenseless mother and sister — would never tell them what.
Tartaglia would never admit to himself that he left home simply because he could no longer bear their gaze.
***
On the seventh day of the week, Zhongli invited Tartaglia on a trip to Luhua Pool. Tartaglia was curious about the body Zhongli kept hidden under all that formality. Was he muscly? Solid? Slender? The answer came by evening, when the moon illuminated Zhongli's shoulders before they slipped beneath the water. He was delicately beautiful, almost nymph-like, an elegance that seemed unfitting for a man.
Before joining Zhongli in the water, Tartaglia glanced down at his own body and felt, for the first time, self-conscious about his scars. They covered him like the hives he'd had as a child. Old ones, faded and grayish — Ajax's scars. There were few of them, and every single story behind them was equally stupid and dull. One went like this: Ajax liked climbing trees. He liked it, but he wasn't any good at it.
The new scars, pink and raw, were Tartaglia's — battle scars, not yet memories of another life. They covered his arms, stomach, shoulders, chest, back. Some short, some long, some shallow, some deep.
At some point, the sheer difference between their bodies struck Tartaglia as funny, and he joked:
"Compared to you, I look like I fell into a pit of knives and rolled around in it for fun."
Zhongli raised an eyebrow, turning to face him:
"Is that what you call it?"
Tartaglia stared at him, bewildered, for several long seconds until realization dawned, and he burst out laughing, remembering how he had fallen into a bottomless pit where even starlight never reached, scraped himself on knives with several heads and three jaws apiece, and sent his soul tumbling down an endless spiral of his own deaths.
"Yeah," Tartaglia said once his laughter subsided. "That's what I call it."
Zhongli sighed and went back to rinsing himself with lake water. Tartaglia imagined Zhongli closing his eyes and pointing at a random spot on his body, inevitably landing on one of the pink scars. In his mind, Tartaglia would then take his wrist and guide it, deliberately, to a faded gray line on his side, and tell him—the first person in years—how he'd once rummaged through his father's storage shed and accidentally cut his stomach on something sharp.
There were no heroic deeds in Ajax's stories, yet Tartaglia still hoped Zhongli would like them.
***
Tartaglia has trouble distinguishing pleasure from pain, mixing them up and taking them for the same thing like a child who learned to love his father despite the birch rod, like a youth who found himself through death. Zhongli doesn't like causing pain; he keeps pain and intimacy as separate as he keeps his past as Morax and his present as Zhongli: the whip is for cattle and punishment, the palm and lips — for intimacy. But it doesn't work with Tartaglia; Tartaglia is like a broken lock: trying to open him gently will only break the key.
A fool's head finds trouble everywhere — cracks its skull open, drenches itself in tears and blood. Zhongli was ready to forgive him, to search in countless coffins and kiss his cold lips, to offer himself in place of death. And Tartaglia always agreed but never promised anything. Zhongli doesn't deceive himself; he knows, he remembers: death is dearer to Tartaglia than his own father and mother, and Morax has never once managed to save anyone he loved. And still he tries, searches for the tumor by touch, pressing and lashing until bruises bloom, overlapping, crisscrossing, breaking down every defense.
Finally, he finds it: when the door comes off its hinges and splinters fly, when the bruises on Tartaglia's back became exactly the kind of bruises his father had left on Ajax a decade ago. Zhongli peels away the old scars, washes the still-festering wound with his mouth, and then Tartaglia's voice breaks again — he laughs and weeps like a child, like he once did at thirteen.
***
A little over two months had passed since Tartaglia left Liyue. Zhongli filled the heaviness of workdays and the dreariness of everyday life with visits to the restaurants where Tartaglia had thoughtfully settled his bills half a year in advance. His rare diversions were conversations on the ferry, which, unlike talks with Tartaglia, always managed to tire him, if only a little.
The investigation of the Chi statues in Qingce Village had recently resumed, but now sifting through memories of the past while debating with historians had become even harder. Zhongli had no desire to speak of old enemies — he wanted to discuss breakfast at Wanmin Restaurant, feed the birds, complain about the weather, and watch the harbor from the balcony in the evenings. But he could share none of this with anyone but Tartaglia, and Tartaglia was impossibly far away.
Zhongli bought a warm coat and wrote long letters, but as he listened to the hum of ships in the harbor and the rumble of the dark sea, his unease grew: something was stirring out there, something ripening in the black water.
Those days were cold, no matter how you tried to warm yourself.
"Come back soon. I am waiting for you."
***
In the end, after Tartaglia had grown tired of other prisoners' jokes in Meropide, he proposed a game: guess each other's homeland by appearance alone, or pure intuition. "If people are meant to be friends, they'll recognize each other before they ever speak," some clever person had once said. Tartaglia believed that a person's homeland was one of the most fundamental things about them.
The Fontainian — he'd later learn his name was Poirier — was easy for Tartaglia to figure out immediately. Even in work clothes, the man reeked of that characteristic, unbearable spiritual dreariness. The one who would later introduce himself as Alexis looked vacuously friendly, not worth prioritizing. But the third man was the most suspicious. Zhongli had once said that if you want to learn someone's secret, you should reveal one of your own — another's vulnerability often compels people to expose theirs. Well, Tartaglia had no objection to testing that theory.
"Alright, my turn. So..."
Tartaglia smiled, then used his fingers to stretch the left corner of his mouth back nearly to his ear, revealing the gap where one of his upper back teeth used to be. The three men stared thoughtfully as Tartaglia turned his head this way and that, giving them a better view, as if he took some kind of pride in a missing tooth
"Who did that to you?"
Tartaglia let go of his lip, snapping back to a normal expression like flipping a switch.
"My father knocked it out. After I got into a fight with the local pack. I was... fourteen? My mom kept hoping it was just a baby tooth, but I couldn't even give her that hope. I just couldn't remember if it had already fallen out on its own or not."
Judging by the group's reaction, this revelation made no impression on them whatsoever.
"If you knocked out his teeth too, then it's only fair," the third man shrugged. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as they say."
Tartaglia's eyes lit up with the same glee he felt whenever he managed to sink a knife between someone's ribs.
"You're from Snezhnaya!" Though for a second, Tartaglia felt a twinge of sadness at the thought that he'd grown so unaccustomed to his homeland that he couldn't recognize a compatriot immediately. "Me too, so I guess we're going to be friends," he said, extending a hand for a handshake.
The handshake only came half a minute later, but at least the third man finally introduced himself:
"I'm Leonide."
Tartaglia shook his new acquaintance's hand vigorously, all the way up to the forearm, at one point vividly imagining stripping the flesh from the bone with a sharp pull. The lack of light and fresh air was really getting to him. And that voice at night... howling. For some reason, it sounded very much like a woman's.
***
Tartaglia screamed and threw his head back, looking past Zhongli, through the ceiling and the roof, finally returning to where it was still so terrifying; he tried to find his balance, to hold on, if only now — but he fell again anyway, and Zhongli hauled him back with a sharp tug. The red sky turned blue again, the wolves fled, someone's loving hands — the mother's hand or Zhongli's hand, both, it didn't matter — pulled him out from the edge of the pit, brushed the snow from his coat, kissed his cold red cheeks, said, "We made it. It's okay. Let's go home."
Zhongli kissed Tartaglia on his dry lips, and Tartaglia tried to turn his head away, to squeeze his eyes shut, but in the end he opened them and let himself be seen. His head burned with warmth: Zhongli pressed their foreheads together, gazing with unfocused eyes into the fading gleam in Tartaglia's, living through his memory as if it were his own. Here is the boy Ajax falling into the Abyss, in pain and terrified; here is Tartaglia, laughing in the face of what killed him, but Zhongli knows, now he feels it himself: he is still in pain, still terrified; only now, it's different.
"Let's go," Tartaglia agreed, and then the gleam was gone, his eyes clouding over, the blue of his irises dissolving into dark rings, like black ink spreading in water. Zhongli cradled his face, one hand spanning from jaw to hairline, their foreheads pressed together in a futile attempt to stop time, to catch him before he fell — but he couldn't.
The boy Ajax kept falling for a long, long time, and then finally he fell and broke his spine.
***
"There are not actually that many battles in an Archon's life," Zhongli observed gently. Tartaglia grew a little quieter and stopped turning his head—he always went still like that when he was truly listening to someone. "Most of the time, you need to care for the people: make sure they have shelter and food, that they live in a safe place and aren't afraid to raise their children and watch their family grow."
Zhongli would have said more, gone into detail, but when he reached for the memories, his words failed him. He wanted to tell Tartaglia how he'd given his people new food sources, but instead, he remembered the people burying their families because of famine and drought. When Guizhong fell, Morax's martial prowess was useless. He couldn't turn back time, and he couldn't find the right words to say to Streetward Rambler.
"So a good Archon needs to be able to kill enemies quickly, before they can destroy the villages and fields?" Tartaglia asked, with just enough mockery to remind Zhongli of his audience, without seeming like an ungrateful listener.
Or maybe he hadn't managed it, and Zhongli had taken offense after all, falling silent as if he hadn't heard a thing. Tartaglia didn't press — after all, a ex-Archon could allow himself any whim, including deliberate deafness. Tartaglia even found it endearing.
"No," Zhongli finally answered. "A good Archon needs to be able to bear another's pain."
***
When, during one of their walks, Zhongli rolled his eyes and pretended they didn't know each other, Tartaglia finally snapped:
"Stop acting like I annoy you."
Zhongli gave him an expectant look and said nothing, faithfully adhering to the principle that the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. Tartaglia didn't keep him waiting: not because he shared that principle, but because he never lacked for words.
"You're bored with life," he said. At this, Zhongli raised his left eyebrow but didn't argue. "You can pretend to be an ordinary person all you want, but you spent centuries dealing with Adepts who tried to die, save Liyue, destroy Liyue, grind your nerves to dust, then rinse and repeat." Tartaglia shrugged, as if to show Zhongli that he was cut from the same cloth, a weathered old sage who'd been through it all himself. "Ordinary people don't interest you. It'd be weird if they did. You love people like me."
Tartaglia spread his arms wide, clearly presenting himself as the most desirable prize in the world. Zhongli bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, but the left corner of his mouth treacherously crept upward anyway.
"And what kind of people are those?" Zhongli tilted his head slightly.
"Strong," Tartaglia began listing, and Zhongli could clearly see how hard he was working not to beat his chest. "Unconventional. Brave."
Zhongli couldn't help but chuckle:
"Some people might call you temerarious instead."
"No, Mr. Zhongli," Tartaglia suddenly rolled his eyes, as if addressing a small child, "no one's going to call me temerarious, because we live in an age of cameras and flying boats, and no one except you uses words like that anymore."
Zhongli had no comeback for that, so they continued their walk: Tartaglia pacing quickly and restlessly, Zhongli feeling the ground vibrate with restless energy that had no battle to spend itself on. His voice was rougher, deeper. The city's hustle parted around Tartaglia as if he were a bloodstain on the road.
"Pulcinella once said," Tartaglia recalled suddenly, "that I'm not the kind of person anyone should fall in love with."
Zhongli glanced at the dagger at Tartaglia's hip and thought that Pulcinella had been right.
***
"Your life story would make a pretty good road movie, monsieur," the woman said to Tartaglia, holding a stack of papers in her hand with the same confident menace as if it were a revolver. Tartaglia knew that gesture — the telltale mark of a very specific kind of occupational habit. He'd only been spared it himself because no single weapon ever stayed in his hand long enough to leave a mark.
Tartaglia preferred his hands stained with blood, not with the mark of a handle or a trigger. He had no respect for Fontaine's firearms, even though Snezhnaya had bought the rights to the technology. Guns were dry and soulless—tools for statistical killing, not for battle. Perhaps that was why the people of Fontaine turned out so dull and bland, as flavorless as the waters that surrounded them. After all, could those who had rejected the sacredness of taking another's life ever truly value their own?
"Think about it. You could sell your story to some director — they'd make a film out of it." She was definitely mocking him. But what else could she do, except take revenge for the personal inconvenience he'd caused her, wrapped in the thin veneer of gratitude for saving her nation? "And your road could be all of Teyvat."
"My story isn't over yet." Tartaglia took his documents from the woman who had executed many, but never truly killed. He had no respect for people like that. "I wouldn't want to deprive the director of the best part of the material."
How had that duke referred to her?
Ah, right.
"Goodbye, made-" Tartaglia attempted the Fontainian pronunciation, but his accent betrayed him. "mademoiselle Clorinde."
***
Tartaglia began every adventure with the certainty that he would get lucky — and, even more astonishingly, he did. He nestled in the bosom of demons and was kissed on both cheeks by angels; lightning coiled around his hands, water lapped at his feet, the Abyss scratched his head. A solution always presented itself, the balance held firm: Tartaglia tossed the coin of his life, and every time it landed on its edge. He returned from the dead, bringing back what cannot be found in the world of men: armor woven from black holes, blueprints of ancient swords, power that gods would hunt for. The trap snapped shut, but the bait remained untouched — as if it had never been needed at all.
Out of sheer curiosity, Tartaglia willingly stepped into his own snare, swapping places with the captive: laid himself down, opened himself wide — soul, legs — took in the foreign, hot and heavy, stretching him from within; let it bite a piece off him, just to know what part of him was best. The best part of him was the boy's heart, was the neck he'd so often caught cold in as a child. Zhongli stroked his chest with his palm, pulling him closer, burying his nose in the hair at his shoulder. Tartaglia didn't like the answer, but Zhongli didn't care — he wasn't testing Tartaglia's reactions, but Ajax's: whether he would flinch if filled to the brim, whether a touch to his stomach would feel like a tickle.
Ajax exceeded all expectations: silently opened his mouth, chapped from frost; moved Zhongli's hand to the place where an old childhood scar lay; boiled him in the scalding water of human emotion until the accursed divinity and old memory sloughed off his bones, and Zhongli felt that it was all his fault. As if he had once set Ajax's chain of misfortunes in motion: scolded him with a disappointed father's voice, tormented him with brothers' mockery for being soft, let a sad mother's gaze drag over him, long and unbearable. As if he had once left the door unbolted, letting him run into the forest; had turned into the endless monsters in the Abyss: fanged, misshapen, many-headed, each head tens of times more terrifying than any forest beast and hundreds of times more harmless than the people Tartaglia would later meet on his path.
The revelation crashed over Zhongli like ice water in the morning, like the first breath after nearly drowning. He tried to stop, to slow down; unclenched his jaw, loosened his grip, let go — and only then did Tartaglia realize he was crying: from greed, from the unbearable desire to have more. There was no room — there was already too much inside him: boyish curiosity, a lost teddy bear, rotted despair, a gnawed little body, childhood fear — but does a mountain fall if you toss one more stone on top?
He wished Zhongli would test it — he was ready to try it himself: jerked suddenly from that irrational human urge to make it hurt more, turned his head, opened himself to everything. Body memory blurred: Skirk choked him, his father beat him, his mother slapped him, Zhongli... kissed him? Did Zhongli kiss him, and did it even matter what Zhongli was doing? Tartaglia had long stopped caring what ran down his legs: blood or semen. Only one thing mattered: what Zhongli could give him, and how to make him give it — to bring Zhongli's hands and mouth back, to pour strength through his veins again, to make everything around him hurt and feel alive.
When Tartaglia came, he felt wrung out like an old rag from his father's house — the one his mother used to wipe their rotten floorboards. And with stunning clarity, he remembered: in the farthest corner of the hut, next to the storage room, stood an armchair that stood over a bloodstain from his fight with his father. That stain had never washed out, and Tartaglia had imagined many times how Zhongli would take him in that very armchair, pressing him into it until they fell and continued on the floor; how Zhongli would grab him by the roots of his hair and press his head exactly where, at fourteen, Ajax's head had landed after his father's blow. The old trickle of blood on the wooden plank would meet his mouth again, closing the recursion.
***
You spoke to me again only eleven years later. It took you four months to give me to the Fatui. It took you ten years and eight months to ignore my existence. Why now?
"You've grown up, Ajax."
When I was a child, I thought you were brave: strong, daring, had traveled half the world in those very boots you'd pull out of the closet to show off. "Snow, mud—they don't care," you'd say. When I was a teenager, I despised you. You seemed such a coward. A "little man," as they say in Fontaine — I thought of you the first time I heard that word.
"I regret what happened between us back then."
Now I've stopped thinking about you altogether. You gave me to the army because you couldn't handle me yourself. Sometimes I thought you hated me, but then I understood: you hated yourself for not having the strength to either beat some sense into me or just sit down and talk.
"Remember how we used to go fishing together?"
You despise my lover, even though you've never seen him and forbade anyone to speak his name. Teucer was too small back then, and later he'd only see me once every six months. He never could have loved the person you described to him. At least mother was there, never letting you speak like that and telling him good things about me instead.
"I'm proud of you."
What am I supposed to say to you, dad?
***
In the end, he went back to where it started. The fourth time he'd tried — and the only one that counted. The hut was so buried in snow that not even rowing could get him through. Ajax trampled a path anyway, knocked, and called out, "Mom? Dad? Tonia? Teucer? Anton? Anyone home?" The door creaked as if it hadn't been touched in decades, then cracked open, hesitant. The chain on the lock was tarnished, once painted gold, now mottled gray. It glinted in the candlelight spilling from inside.
Through the gap, Tonia's eyes stared back at him — large, round, deep blue. But her lashes were wrong. They weren't hers.
"Sister?" Ajax said. The door swung open, the chain flying somewhere into the depths of the room — it didn't clink against the floor, as if there were no floorboards there, only a vast black space. Ajax looked down anyway and later remembered the fairy tales his mother used to read him: never look away from witches and sorcerers. He was right. They were standing on crushed mirror. Tonia?.. she was wearing their father's old felt boots. Her feet were the same size as the old man's, as if she'd taken her father's feet — frostbitten from years of fishing, trousers, boots and all — and sewn them onto herself.
"You're back," she said in a thin voice, stretching the corners of her lips, but it wasn't a smile. "I've been waiting." She blinked, brushed her cheek, and her lashes were much darker than Ajax's, darker even than the real Tonia's. Ajax understood: they were Teucer's lashes.
Ajax recoiled, barely stopping himself from shoving her. If she fell, would she crumble into snowballs like a broken snowman? Would the lashes fall from her lids, would their father's feet get up and walk away? What stitches and spells held them together under Anton's little green coat?
"You don't love me," she whispered. Her mother's fingers grew from the palms of her older brothers, the top joints missing from their ring and index fingers — as if she'd gnawed them off in anguish while waiting for Ajax. Hands grabbed Ajax's scarf, barely brushing his chin. The skin felt inhuman: cold, rough, and melting all at once, as if made of snow. "You always leave me. Always."
Ajax screamed and ran down the old path: the wolves and bears were chasing him again, and when he looked back—the house was gone, only snow in its place. The girl with the wrong feet was gone too — only a white-and-blue figure shimmered in the night, sparkling like the Snegurochka, strangling herself with a scarlet scarf.
***
Zhongli passed his hand over Tartaglia's face a few times, left to right, testing his reaction.
"Incredible," Tartaglia said, catching his breath, with the intonation of a child tasting gingerbread for the first time after ten years of gnawing on stale crusts. His gaze fixed on Zhongli's palm—on the space between his middle and ring fingers, on the fate line. The hand was finally still, the skin faintly glistening with sweat and pale lubricant. Tartaglia lifted his head and tried to bite but Zhongli pulled his hand away just in time.
"Give him a finger and he'll bite off the whole arm up to the elbow," Zhongli mused, wiping his fingers on Tartaglia's thighs.
Tartaglia was silent, pondering, trying to decide which he liked more: feeling the weight of millennia-old mountains above him, or grinding stone to dust himself. He decided the latter could wait, and stayed lying as he was.
"Yep, that one's about me," Tartaglia agreed automatically—the way he agreed to everything else: going fishing, killing a dragon and cooking its head over a campfire, trading his left eye to death for a fifth life. "I want more."
Zhongli kissed the tip of Tartaglia's freckled nose.
"A little later."
Tartaglia snorted, wrapped around him like a hot water bottle, and finally dragged him into his old world, the one whose path he himself had long lost forever: Zhongli lay down beside him in the snow, let out a puff of steam from his mouth, swept his arms and legs out to the sides, and made a snow angel just like Tartaglia's, linking their wings together into a single creature. Tartaglia laughed and adjusted the fur at Zhongli's collar: "What're you doing, so careless? You'll get snow down your neck and catch a cold. My mother will laugh at you: you, Liyueans, are so delicate. Such softies. And Anton will nod along and laugh even louder."
Above them, the blue sky of Snezhnaya — the sky Zhongli had never seen in life.
***
He bathed in milk, in boiling water, in ice-cold water, but a true hero is not what he became — when he returned home from the Abyss, his mother looked at him with disgust and fear, as if he were covered in bull's blood. In Morepesok, a boy became a man when he felled his first bear; Tartaglia considered his first victim to be himself: he peeled the tender Ajax’s flesh from his bones and grew new skin, honed his teeth into daggers, returned through death — and still, there was no place for him.
Tartaglia's whole life was held together by a fragile system of checks and balances: if his father hadn't been respected in the village, the villagers would have hanged Ajax in the square. And if Ajax hadn't loved his father, he would have killed the villagers himself before they ever reached their door. In the end, everyone stayed alive and equally dissatisfied: the villagers didn't like living in fear, Ajax's father didn't like living with a branded son, Ajax didn't like living among such ordinary people.
But what he hated most was that they stopped holding him. His father despised him, and his mother flinched away, as if Ajax had never washed off the blood, as if his tongue had been replaced with a pig's heart and he was no boy but a piglet. Only later, many years later, remembering himself in an attempt to draw a line between childhood and youth, between Ajax and Tartaglia, he would admit: it all ended at fourteen — not because that was when he returned from the Abyss, but because that was the day his mother first recoiled from him.
***
Tartaglia had two tasks: to last a little while on the bottom and not seize control. He failed both — he liked what was happening, but he liked being disobedient even more. The spoiled child, Zhongli thought. Hasn't changed since childhood — still measures love not by what people do for him, but by what they forgive him for. Tartaglia immediately compensated for his transgression, this time fully justifying Zhongli's thoughts about him: he flipped them over, settling down on top of him in a way that was uncomfortable for them both. Tartaglia didn't complain—discomfort was simply part of life for him.
"I sometimes dream," Tartaglia said between breaths, rising and falling on Zhongli's body, "that he is me." Tartaglia liked to talk, mostly about himself and often at the wrong moments. In bed, this habit reached disastrous proportions, but Zhongli had long grown used to it.
The discomfort vanished somewhere around the fifteenth thrust. Tartaglia grew tired of being difficult, shifted his weight back, straightened his shoulders, stopped pressing his hips down so insistently. He opened himself to Zhongli's touch: Zhongli stroked his sides, his stomach, pinched his nipples, ran his hand lower. Tartaglia's mouth fell open on an exhale, then closed; opened again in a silent moan. On the third time, he quickened his own pace, leaned forward, braced himself on Zhongli's shoulders. And then Tartaglia told him. Told him how he had been the strongest of all, how gods knelt before him, their priestesses pressed themselves to his chest, dragons licked his heels.
He had been a leader, a gladiator, a thief, a shepherd, a tyrant; he had been the sun and springwater. He was loved, and then they tore him into four pieces, and he went across the world questing for his arms, his legs, his heart, his tongue. He traveled the earth three times and found nothing; on the fourth, he almost reached his heart, but even his tongue would not return to him. Someone was calling him, searching for him, with a woman's longing, as if he, too, had been someone's heart; he tried to follow that voice through winters, sunken empires, deserts — but still he lost his way, forgot who he was and what he was looking for.
Zhongli cut through the thought, took him by the hands, pulled him back into position, thrust upward across the bed. Tartaglia followed by inertia, falling somewhere between sleep, dream-memories, and fairy tales—into those book-bound moments of triumph his father used to read to him. He glimpses more: young men drenched in whale blood raise harpoons and chant his name. Ajax. Ajax. Ajax. Maidens weave forget-me-not garlands, all of them white-skinned, white-haired, as if made of snow—but their hands are Tonia's, their gestures his mother's. They beg him for something, voices layering over one another, but he, it seems, never keeps his promise. And around him, somehow, green fields instead of snowdrifts.
For some reason, this irritates him: he ruins everything, and everything turns to snow—yet he finds no comfort in this, either. Someone builds a snowman for him, then stares weeping at three spheres spattered with red, a carrot nose, button eyes. He feels shame but can't find the words to apologize.
Everything bleeds and weeps beneath his steps as he walks on, trying to find peace in his soul, not knowing that this thirst will remain with him long after the winter ends.
***
The Gates to the Abyss on Mask Reef had not changed in the slightest over the passing millennia. The surface of the lake surrounding them was as serene as ever, the runes shone with the same cold, bright light, and the portal's energy was an endless, coiling spiral. Zhongli had not been here for so long that the sight of this island, of these stones seemingly untouched by erosion or age, still had the power to overwhelm him. The same sky. The same trees, not a single branch taller than he remembered. For hours, Zhongli wandered the sandy shore in a daze, watching the sea turn blue and the crabs dig their holes in the sand, and his heart ached.
The island had been here since the beginning of the world, since Sal Vindagnyr, since the first tree. And it would remain, he supposed, until the borders of the inhabited Teyvat crumbled and the darkness swallowed the light. Few know it, but the souls of all who perished sank into the Abyss. Whether they died by their own hand or by another's, all were caught up in the elemental currents and dragged down into the primordial darkness, the eternal spiral. Within the Abyss, they were pulled through all twelve circles until their memories wore away and their souls dissolved into pure energy, yearning to return to the world, to be reborn in a new place, in a new form, in a different time, having become something entirely other.
Celestia forbids the telling of this truth: the primordial radiance of the gods does not protect them from the Abyss. They do not like to be reminded of this at certain times: gods remain in the world through the memories of men, feeding on their feelings, thoughts, and hopes, and so they never truly die. Unlike humans. Even those marked by the Abyss.
It had only been six months since Tartaglia's death — so foolish, so senseless. Zhongli had taken leave without pay, and no matter how Hu Tao protested, she was left with no choice but to let him go. Their contract was not broken: Zhongli intended to return home, and his will was stronger than it had ever been. It was simply that, for now, he was not ready to give up without a fight.
The endless twisted spiral is deceptive; it warps time and space, ensnares you in webs of your own fears, and refuses to let you pass into the darkness that lies beyond. Enemies rise up like shadows of the past, every pain surges back to life, and for those who seek to reach the bottom, new battles are inevitable. But if, at the depths of the Abyss, Tartaglia were to meet him — even in the guise of the monster — then none of it would be in vain.
After victory, Zhongli would put an arm around Tartaglia's shoulders and say: "You promised to be back by summer. Keep your word. Let's go home."
Morax had been Rex Lapis, the Groundbreaker, God of the Stove, and many, many other things. Morax was dead; no one would inscribe his new title upon the priestly scrolls. But perhaps the people would weave legends of Zhongli, who journeyed to the very bottom of the Abyss and did not return alone. And if they did not, then to hell with them. With three millennia of service to his people, he had earned the right, just once, to fight only for himself and for the one he refused to leave behind in the dark.