Archive of Our Own

Kazuha’s dreams always start the same way, whether he knows that he is in one or not. 

It used to unnerve him, at first, the way he opens his eyes to find himself so suddenly in the middle of the scene--he hears the sound of his footsteps before he knows that he’s running, feels the tightness in his chest before he understands the panic in his heart. After so many repetitions, though, he’s long grown used to it, enough that it barely gives him pause when he blinks into awareness this way, settling into the rhythm of his surroundings as the final stair of the Tenshukaku comes into view.

Sometimes, this is all there is to the dream. The stairs will stretch on into infinity, each step unraveling as soon as his foot touches its surface, and he never gets any closer to the top. He never makes it to the throne room’s entrance, never sees what’s waiting for him there, and in the glacial seconds that tick by before he wakes, he’s allowed to imagine that this never happens at all.

He likes it better this way, likes it more than when the fabric of the dream shifts and he finds himself standing at the top, the way he does now.

When he looks up, there are always three people in front of him, suspended in place as if they’d been waiting for him to arrive in order for the moment to begin. There’s Raiden’s right-hand woman, her weapon neatly sheathed and her head dipped respectfully as she awaits her master’s next command. There’s the Shogun herself, her back half-turned and her hand raised as in afterthought, violet sparks crackling at her fingertips, arcs of electricity leaping halfway into the air. 

Then there’s Tomo--or at least, there’s his back, the torn fabric of his haori fluttering away from him in pieces, his sword broken cleanly into shards at his feet. 

Even after all this time, the outline of Tomo’s body still sends a distant ache through him, still makes his fingers tremble when Kazuha instinctively lifts his hand and reaches towards him.

“Tomo,” he says, and although he hears his own voice, he’s not sure that anyone else does, with the way the world is so still.

But it’s always here that time seems to unfreeze, and Kazuha feels the breath leave him at the rumble of thunder that ripples across the clearing, the knowledge of what comes next. He lunges forwards in what is now a familiar motion, the scraps of Tomo’s clothing turning to dust when they pass through the gaps between his fingers.

He can save him, the thought flickers across his mind as if he hasn’t considered this ten, twenty times before, as if this is a novel revelation and not a desperate wish. If he can reach him, if he can grab at Tomo’s arm or the back of his haori, he can pull his friend away, can drag him back over the border of the throne room and back to where he belongs.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise when he doesn’t--the bolt of Raiden’s power completes its journey faster than Kazuha ever could, violet light piercing Tomo’s chest and arching his back in his final spasm of life. Kazuha even hears it, the moment when Tomo’s last breath leaves him in a quiet gasp, but somehow, he’s never prepared for it, the way his heart seizes so painfully in his chest that the rest of him goes numb.

He always feels far away from himself when the dream moves forwards from here, as if Raiden’s lightning had struck him instead, like he’s the one who’s been set adrift, separated from his own body. From a distance, he watches as Tomo’s body collapses in a soundless motion, his form curled on the ground with a stillness that Tomo had never been capable of in life. The impact of it finally undoes the fraying ties that bind Tomo’s Vision to his back, the glass orb sliding down and touching the marble floor with a soft chink.

Kazuha stares at it, watching the color slowly bleed out of the Vision until its empty shell nearly matches the stainless white of the rest of the throne room. Something shifts uncomfortably in his chest, stirring against the heaviness he’s buried beneath in feeble protest, and in his next blink, Tomo’s Vision is in his hand.

The weight of it feels like an anchor, the touch of cool glass grounding his senses for long enough for his senses to realize the danger he’s in, the telltale crackle of energy as Raiden prepares her next blast.

He just barely twists out of the way in time for the heat of her attack to singe the edges of his hair, and then an updraft of his own power saves him from another strike at his back. His body twists in the air to correct his landing, his fingers curling around Tomo’s Vision, and the instant he returns to the ground, he runs.

Some nights, he makes it out of the Tenshukaku after this, with Tomo’s Vision still held close to the frantic beat of his heart. In unluckier versions, the ending is cut short by a stinging burst of Electro, a heat so intense that the burning in his veins stays with him when he wakes, his breaths coming shallow and short in his chest.

Kazuha can’t help but think that it doesn’t matter either way--whether he escapes or not, he will always find himself in this place again, frozen in the same moment each night.

It’s still dark when Beidou comes to drag him out of bed.

He jerks awake at the sound of her first footfall on the ship’s stairs, half of him still left behind on the Tenshukaku’s steps, forever reaching for the perfect moment of Tomo’s back.

For a moment, he shuts his eyes and listens for her approach, to the easy confidence in her stride, attempting to steady his breathing and properly compose himself in the few seconds he has before he faces her. 

An empty chill passes through him when he tries to sit up, tilting his head as he hears Beidou hesitating outside of his door, evidently debating with herself on whether or not to wake him. After all, it’s become something of an infamous trait of his amongst the crew, his consistent love of sleep--even if his favorite pastime is quickly becoming the activity he’d rather avoid the most.

Whatever the issue is, though, apparently takes precedence over her concerns, and she knocks quietly at his door a moment later, a restrained gesture that indicates that she means to wake him and him alone.

“Hey--you alive in here, kid?”

Strangely, the sound of her voice is enough to settle the frantic beat of his heart, and it’s this that allows him to wipe any hint of his unease from his face as he opens the door. Her hand is still raised in midair, her fingers curled into a loose fist, and the sudden absence of the wooden door and the equally sudden presence of his face gives her pause.

“Captain,” he answers, dipping his head respectfully, not missing the grimace that passes over her face at his usual formality. She’s been trying to get him to loosen up for weeks, but he isn’t quite sure how --there’s a distance between himself and the rest of the crew that he doesn’t know how to close. “Has something happened?”

She folds her arms, her gaze turning somewhat questioning as she sizes him up, clearly not having expected to see him so alert. He can’t exactly blame her, when they’ve had several unfortunate encounters of this fashion in the past, each ending with Kazuha being unwillingly ejected from his comfortable blanket nest and into whatever scenario Beidou had called upon him to resolve. 

“Something like that,” she says at last, and there’s an edge in her voice that doesn’t quite match the carefree tone of her words. “You remember that merchant ship we were oh-so-generously escorting, right?”

Kazuha does remember--they’d encountered the other Liyuen vessel dead in the water along their path to Inazuma, and after much negotiation and several rounds of drinks, Beidou had been convinced to take them along. They’d been a bit too loud for Kazuha’s taste, though, and with sleep deprivation wearing his patience thin, he’d thought it best to retire to bed early, to sleep through the rest of their company until they reached Inazuma proper.

Not that the extra hours of sleep had exactly helped him, all things considered.

While his homeland’s borders are still closed under the Shogunate’s decree, Beidou and her crew have little problem with bending the law in favor of smuggling goods across the ocean. He’s quite familiar with this practice, seeing as he himself was amongst the illicit cargo, not too long ago, so he’s hardly in a position to object to their return here.

Unfortunately, he deeply suspects that it’s this renewed proximity to the land he’d left behind that’s made him this way, that’s led him to revisit the same scene every night, three months after Tomo’s death.

He says none of this aloud, tilting his head in indication for her to continue.

“Well, seems like one of the bastards has friends in high places here--he took off with some of our best goods a couple hours ago, probably to sell it off for easy coin.” Beidou cracks her knuckles against her palm, the corner of her lips turning up in a sharp smirk. “Not that he’s going to get far.”

Kazuha blinks, unsure of whether to be impressed by the man’s gall or fearful for his safety--it certainly took a very special type of person to so easily cross the woman who slew Haishan.

“And...you are requesting my help in locating him?”

“Yeah. Normally, I’d leave you and your beauty sleep in peace, but you’ve got a talent for this, and we’re kind of in a hurry, what with the fact that we’re technically trespassing on Inazuma territory. That, and you know the area better than any of us here.”

His stomach twists unpleasantly at the idea of setting foot in Inazuma again, no matter how brief, but he can hardly argue with her reasoning. Even if he had cause to object, he still owes Beidou a great debt for taking him in--it isn’t his place to refuse whatever she might need of him.

“Of course. My blade is always at your disposal,” he answers softly, then starts to step out, only to be stopped by Beidou’s steady hand grabbing at the back of his clothing.

“Uh, you seem to be forgetting something, kid,” she says with a laugh, and it takes him a moment to realize that he’s still dressed in his nightclothes, the thin fabric offering him little protection against the chill of the wind. “You sure you’re not still asleep?”

Kazuha ducks his head with a light flush as Beidou steps aside to allow him back into his room. He closes the door behind him in lieu of a response, unsure of the answer to the question himself, and moves to dress himself in a manner more befitting a midnight expedition. 

His fingers hesitate over the cool glass of Tomo’s Vision when he slips it out from beneath his pillow, and for a moment, he stares at it in the dark, privately weighing it against his hand.  He doubts they’ll be out for long, but he tucks it into the folds of fabric near his chest anyways.

A moment later, he’s following after Beidou’s turned back, hurrying after her in order to match the pace she’s set with her unfairly long stride. She fills him in on the details as they move above deck--the crew had gone to sleep two hours ago, and then Furong had taken inventory of their stock an hour later, meaning the thief and the accompanying goods had disappeared neatly into that timeframe.

“At least we know what direction he’s gone in,” Beidou says dryly, gesturing to the port city that they’ve docked at, and Kazuha forces his gaze to follow the motion of her hand, his breath hitching uncomfortably in his chest at the familiar sight.

Ritou is the most exterior of Inazuma’s port cities, and is the same place he’d found himself in some months ago, once he’d run out of places to escape to. He does know this area well, if only because he’d hidden amongst its crowds for some time, wandering aimlessly about until Beidou had finally offered him an out.

Perhaps she’s thinking of that same moment, because Kazuha feels her eyes on the back of his neck, followed by the steady weight of her hand on his shoulder a moment later.

“Sorry. I know this isn’t the best place for you to be--I wouldn’t ask you to come if it wasn’t important.”

He looks back at her, tucking away the memory in favor of offering her a small smile, a part of him oddly warmed by the obvious concern in her voice, even with the urgency of their mission. “I know. I don’t mind it--this is merely the plight of the wanderer, to be carried along the headstrong tempest.”

Beidou chuckles, shoving at him lightly as they make their way off the boat. “A tempest, huh? Not one of my usual titles, but I’ll take it. Anyways, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before sunrise, unless you have something figured out?”

She looks at him expectantly before Kazuha himself registers what he’s unconsciously listening for, the way that the wind weakens as it blows towards the east, indicating a gathering of human presence. It’s late enough that the streets are completely devoid of activity, aside from the two of them and presumably their target, which gives Kazuha a fairly solid idea of where to start.

“Our fleeing friend lies that way, I believe. Although he is no longer alone,” he points out the direction to Beidou, and she nods to herself, his suggestion apparently confirming her suspicions.

“Yeah, I thought so. That’s black market territory, after all. No one else is willing to take in Liyuen contraband these days. Seems like we’ll have to be quick if we want to make it before the hand-off.” 

Kazuha is content to follow that path that Beidou sets for them, trailing after her as they move down the empty streets. She always walks with a sureness that reminds Kazuha of Tomo, somehow, an easy confidence that Kazuha can never quite replicate. Tomo was always fond of dragging Kazuha along with him on the smallest of errands, too--he imagines he would have liked Beidou, if they’d ever had the opportunity to meet.

The thought touches at something still tender in him, makes him falter slightly in his steps. Tomo is an old wound by now, and not too long ago, he’d finally managed to reach a stage where the sharp sting of Tomo’s name had faded into something more of a dull ache.

But his recent dreams, perhaps, have thrown the memory of his friend into sharp relief, and brushing up against it feels like a bruise, bites at him with bone-deep hurt. He swallows hard, touches his palm against the weight of Tomo’s Vision beneath his clothes, and this is when he feels it, the way he suddenly disconnects from the world.

On the outside, nothing has changed. 

He’s still walking behind Beidou, is still chasing down their target and his ill-gotten gains. But he isn’t there, not all of him, a conclusion he comes to quite rapidly when, somewhere in between his last blink and his next, he’s crouched behind a stack of boxes, staring up at Beidou as she peers over the top of them.

A familiar disorientation washes over him--it feels like he’s just woken up again, like he’s burst through the Tenshukaku’s gates only to fall upright and into his bed, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. 

Kazuha takes in a shaky breath, looking down at his hands, then behind him at the rest of their surroundings. He’s not sure how much time has passed, how long they’d walked to get here, the things they’d said or done in the space between then and now. The details of his new location filter in quickly, the sound of low voices alerting him of the illegal exchange occurring some few feet away from them, the tension in Beidou’s posture indicating that she’s about to strike.

“Seems like you were right,” Beidou says lowly as she glances back at him, and Kazuha struggles to catch up to the present, to figure out exactly what he’s supposed to have been right about. “Four of them, like you said.”

He has no memory of saying this, of course, and the most he can manage in response is a nod as he tucks his shaking fingers into his palm to disguise the sudden tremble in them. He should be used to it, to being dropped into the middle of something like this--this is the way the world works in his dreams, after all.

But here in his waking hours, it’s an entirely different matter for him to drift away like this, to have lost such a large gap of time while the rest of him was apparently preoccupied with going through the motions of his life without him.

“...you with me, kid?” 

Kazuha is surprised to find Beidou still staring at him, paying far more attention to him than the matter than they’d come here for, and he wonders how bad off he must appear, for her to prioritize him in this moment. 

His throat tightens under her gaze, a frantic flutter coming to life in his chest--he doesn’t know how he would even begin to explain things, given that he barely understands the situation himself.

“Forgive me,” he answers instead, with a small shake of his head. “I’m...tired, is all.”

Beidou looks him over with a critical eye, but she recognizes that this is hardly the place for an interrogation about his well-being. Still, she taps at his shoulder with a firm touch, her Vision glowing lightly at her waist.

“Guess that’s on me, for hauling you out here with me. You stay here, then. Take it easy,” she tells him, and then before he can protest, she gleefully vaults over the cover of the boxes, electricity trailing from her fingertips in a shower of sparks as her claymore crackles into existence. 

The men in the clearing barely have the time to look surprised before Beidou is upon them, slamming into the concrete upon her landing hard enough to crack the cobblestones beneath her heels. The resulting blast of Electro energy easily knocks away two of the men into blissful unconsciousness, and then another is easily felled by the sweeping arc of her next strike.

The one who’d started this entire affair, the now-panicked merchant, makes it ten, twenty feet before Kazuha finally finds it in himself to move, a blast of wind knocking the man off balance and then Beidou’s foot in his back bringing him to a decisive halt as his face meets the ground.

“Not much of a fight,” she comments, a thinly-veiled disappointment in her tone as she plants the tip of her claymore into the ground, then watches it dissolve into violet shards of energy. “But hey, mission complete, right?”

Kazuha doesn’t respond immediately, instead stepping soundlessly around the broken concrete to move towards her side. He still feels untethered from himself, a feeling he tries to push away as he examines the patterns on the backs of their victims’ haoris. It’s probably a good thing that he hadn’t participated in the fight proper--the three men that the merchant had been meeting with bear the crest of the Inazuman officials, whose duties most certainly include enforcing the Vision Hunt Decree.

They’d seen Beidou, and quite closely at that, but given the illegal nature of their current activities, they probably aren’t in any sort of haste to share the events of what transpired here. Still, he looks around warily, then back at Beidou for guidance.

“What do you think we should do about all of...this?”

Beidou shrugs, bending down to pick up the still groaning merchant and easily slinging him over her shoulder with one arm. With her foot, she kicks the bag of gold he’d been carrying into the air in Kazuha’s direction, and only seventeen years of honed reflexes prevent a shower of Mora from scattering in every direction as he catches it in his arms. 

“Don’t know about the others, but we’re taking this guy back with us. I’ll let the Millelith sort him out--although I’m sure that Ganyu won’t be pleased about the extra paperwork. As for the coin he made selling off our stuff...well, it’s rightfully ours, I’d say.”

“Ah. The law of the sea, I presume?”

Beidou barks out a laugh, and with her free hand she ruffles at his hair, the sudden weight of her fingers making him duck his head into his scarf. Her touch is firm in a way that he misses when she pulls away, and he can’t quite bring himself to fix the messy strands of hair that the motion had pulled loose from its ties.

“Damn straight--see, you’re getting it. We’ll make a proper pirate out of you yet.”

Despite himself, he smiles faintly, and for a second, the lingering haze of exhaustion in his mind seems to lift, the slow-boiling panic that’s been building in his chest quieting into the background. The lingering sensation of Beidou’s touch chases away the uncertainty from earlier, brings him back to the present with a quiet warmth.

“I would not be so certain of that. A proper samurai holds fast to his own values, after all.”

“So you say, but you’ve already made yourself comfortable when it comes to the wine barrels.”

“...well, that is among one of our values.”

“Uh huh. Your flowery words can’t win you this one, kid. Just accept it--you’re turning into one of us.”

Kazuha grows quiet at that, mostly because he has no defense for Beidou’s claims. Still, he holds onto the thought, tucking it away somewhere close to where Tomo’s Vision is nestled by his heart, the warmth of it seeping into his skin. 

He doesn’t drift off again, thankfully, as the two of them head back to the ship, but he counts every step of the way just to be sure, running his fingers over his palm in some kind of odd reassurance. Beidou hands their struggling prisoner off to Juza--who looks almost as displeased as the merchant does, at being awoken at this hour--to be hauled off to the ship’s holding cells, and Kazuha deposits the money with Furong to stash away with the books.

By the time they’ve finished with the explanations and the cleanup, the first birds are just barely starting to wake, the winds changing in pitch as dawn breaks. A yawn cracks across Beidou’s expression as she claps him on the back, the motion smoothly shifting into a lazy wave as she starts to head back down below decks.

“Alright, I’m getting some sleep--Juza, you’re in charge. Don’t wake me up unless Haishan himself is pulling the ship apart or I’ll blast you off the deck. Kazuha, if you’re going to pass out, you better do it down here.”

Kazuha considers it--the sleeping, not the passing out, although he’s tired enough that either is an appealing option--but hesitates at the top of the stairs, unable to help glancing back at the outline of Ritou behind them. A thick sort of dread settles unpleasantly at the pit of his stomach, and his next swallow sticks unpleasantly in his throat, stinging at his cheek when the motion tugs at the broken skin.

There is only one outcome for him, if he sleeps now, and Kazuha has always preferred to avoid tying himself to a single destination.

“It’s alright,” he says softly,  and although he hears his own voice, he’s not sure that anyone else does. He stares into the stillness of the sea as a blanket of fog rolls across his mind, the edges of his awareness softening into a faded white noise. 

“I would prefer to stay here.”

The leaves turn red on the last day he sees Tomo.

He’s unusually quiet as he walks by Kazuha’s side, his fingers fiddling with the edges of his scarf or idly reaching into the folds of his clothing to pet at his cat, Tama purring against his hand. Kazuha normally keeps to himself about these things, but he can’t help watching Tomo out of the corner of his eye, glancing curiously at him every now and then when the silence feels like it stretches on for too long.

They’ve known each other for the better part of six months now--the longest Kazuha has ever had a traveling companion for--and in that time, he’s never once known Tomo to be so subdued. He always seems to be in a constant sort of motion, always filling up the space with idle chatter, even when Kazuha has few words to offer in return.

“Is something wrong?” he finally asks, once they reach the top of the hill, overlooking the village that marks their final, shared destination.

A measure of surprise passes across Tomo’s face at the question, and then he lets out a rueful sort of laugh, rubbing at the back of his head with a hand. 

“Guess I really can’t hide anything from you, huh?” he asks, and it isn’t hard to detect the wistful hint to his tone.

While Tomo is an excellent warrior, he employs none of the self-restraint that Kazuha had formerly come to expect from one of their class. He wears his emotions as easily as his own clothing, open and free in a way that Kazuha has long been taught to bury, and a part of Kazuha admires him for this, if he’s honest with himself.

“I’m just thinking. It’ll be weird, not having you around to watch my back. I know that you can’t follow me, what with about a hundred years of tradition in the way, but...I could come with you.”

Kazuha pauses, considering the highly unrealistic nature of Tomo’s offer--as far as he understands, Tomo was supposed to have left his side at least two months prior, before the change of seasons even had the chance to arrive. When he looks back at the other, meaning to remind him of this fact, Tomo seems to have sudden trouble in meeting his eyes, chewing nervously at the green tea candy he’s always so fond of keeping in his mouth.

It surprises Kazuha, when the sight twists at something soft in Kazuha’s chest, when he suddenly finds that Tomo’s suggestion has opened a fresh longing in him, a faint part of him wanting to keep Tomo with him as well.

But this simply isn’t the way that things are done--they’re meant to part ways here. Kazuha feels it instinctively, hears it in the sound of the wind, and he’s long made peace with the short-lived nature of his companionships. It shouldn’t bother him, that Tomo will drift to the south to retrace the steps his former Master left behind, that the rest of his friend’s journey is something he’s meant to undertake alone. 

Besides, the cord of fate is not so easily cut, and he’s almost certain that he’ll see Tomo again, for as long as they’re meant to meet.

“Our purposes are not the same,” he answers evenly, if only because he finds that he needs to hear this, too. “You have a duty to uphold, and I could not ask you to accompany me when your heart lies elsewhere.”

Tomo turns to him, then, letting out the softest of sighs as he looks Kazuha over, and there’s a fond tilt to his smile that Kazuha can’t quite interpret.

“...my heart, huh?” he repeats, and for a moment, it seems like he might say more, turning his eyes upwards as he folds his arms over his chest. Then, he shakes his head with a short laugh, his hand reaching up to drop into Kazuha’s hair, his thumb brushing Kazuha’s bangs from his face before he pulls away.

Kazuha blinks at the tenderness in the motion, suddenly feeling like he’s perhaps missing something here, but Tomo continues before Kazuha can guess at any further meaning.

“I know, I know--you’re right. Gramps would claw his way out of his grave if he knew I was putting off my responsibilities to run around with you some more.”

Kazuha has never understood it, Tomo’s irreverent relationship with his long-passed Master, but it brings a faint smile to his lips anyways. “Ah. We do not want that, I’m sure.”

“But hey, at least then you’d finally get to meet him, right? Maybe you’d get along. You both like boring poetry.”

“Boring? And yet I had so painstakingly written an elegy for you, to represent our parting.”

“It wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with maple leaves, would it?” Tomo grins as the comment catches Kazuha off-guard. “I told you, you talk in your sleep. It’s cute.”

The way with words that Kazuha is so known for disappears under the heat of his flush, and he ducks his head to escape Tomo’s gaze, unable to construct a proper retort. He hears Tomo laugh for a moment, the sound clear and honest, and then the other extends a callused hand to him, his eyes alight in the sunset.

“So...this is it, then. Take care, Kazuha.”

Kazuha finds himself staring hard at Tomo’s face, then, memorizing the warm set of his features as he takes Tomo’s hand in his own, his fingers curling securely around Tomo’s wrist. He feels the pulse of Tomo’s life against his fingers, strong and steady in a way Kazuha has always known Tomo to be.

Suddenly, he feels as if this is not all that there is to say, that there’s a We’ll meet again, or a I’ll miss you, or something beneath any of that, something to match the warmth that flutters in his chest. His throat tightens, the words sticking together as they struggle to tumble from his lips, but in the end, he swallows them back down, dipping his head to Tomo in farewell.

“I will. May the winds bless your travels, Tomo.”

He stands on top of the hill for a long moment, watching as Tomo sets off, and although his friend doesn’t look back, he extends his hand in a cheerful wave, as if he knows that Kazuha must be watching.

The image freezes, Tomo’s hand suspended in its arc, the world turning an empty cold.

Kazuha blinks, and the disappearing outline of Tomo’s back seems to reset, suddenly directly before him in a painful clarity. The sunset melts away, dusk turning to day, the grass beneath their feet replaced by the frozen marble of the Tenshukaku’s top stair, and Kazuha finds himself reaching out, his fingers grasping at nothing.

It occurs to him, then, in the midst of torn cloth and shattered swords and yet another-- i can save him --that this is how he mostly remembers Tomo now, instead of that sunlit moment of their final parting. The sound of his stopping heart has become louder than his laugh, the color and the warmth of his eyes is now a shadow beside the cold of his lifeless form. 

If this is the only way they’re meant to meet, Kazuha isn’t so sure he wants it--but he thinks that he maybe doesn’t have a choice. Perhaps this is the moment he always comes back to, because this is now all that there is. 

Juza asks him for a favor, the day they arrive in Liyue.

Kazuha pauses as he processes the man’s request, largely because he’s still in the process of coming back to himself--he hasn’t been paying much attention to the entirety of today, even when his present situation rather distinctly calls for it. Some five minutes ago he’d blinked back into awareness to find himself halfway up the mast, fixing the loose ropes of the ship’s rigging, with only a hazy recollection of how he’d gotten here.

Luckily--if he can call it that--drifting away like this has become an increasingly common occurrence for him since that night in Ritou. After so many moments like this, it’d taken him only a second to recover from the dizzying change in his surroundings, and a deft grab at the ropes had successfully rescued him from an unplanned tumble to the deck.

Still, the fresh memory of his close call stays with him when he twists his head to look down at Juza, colorful spots passing briefly across his vision at the movement, and he decides that the best course of action is to set himself on solid ground before continuing the conversation.

Wind gathers at his back, his manufactured breeze cushioning his fall as he lands neatly on his feet, some few paces away from Juza’s alarmed looking expression.

“I always forget you can do that,” the First Mate admits, rubbing uneasily at the back of his head. “You Vision holders really are something else.”

Kazuha shifts under the praise, uncertain of how to respond, and Juza takes his silence as further invitation to continue.

“So, what do you say? The Captain’s out on business, and we can’t let the prisoner rot away here forever, as much as he might deserve it. You feel like helping me bring him off the ship?”

It’s immediately clear that Juza isn’t asking for Kazuha’s company for his own benefit. The man is nearly twice his size, with all the experience of a battle-hardened sailor, and he’s the second most capable person on the ship, after Beidou herself. Their prisoner--the rogue merchant from before--poses about as much of a threat to Juza as an overboiled noodle, and Kazuha is deeply skeptical that his aid is required at all.

Whatever the man’s reasons, Kazuha is grateful for the offer. He hears himself agree to it, feels the way that Juza pats him on the back, then watches the man disappear below deck to fetch their merchant. 

It’s possible that Juza has taken note of Kazuha’s recent activities, the way he’s made something of an effort to keep himself busy. In the past week, he’s taken on all sorts of odd jobs around the ship, in the hope that having something to focus on might prevent his mind from wandering off, with only a limited amount of success.

At the very least, the idle tasks keep him away from his room, where he’s becoming increasingly likely to drop away without his permission. His sleepless nights are starting to add up, and he finds that when the seas are too quiet, even for a moment, the rising tide of unconsciousness tugs at his body, threatening to pull him fully under.

Privately, he thinks it’s a little ridiculous for him to carry on in this way. He knows that this is hardly a sustainable solution, that his constant exhaustion is already presenting a clear cost to his mind. It’s obvious in how slow he is to piece his thoughts together, in the small absences from his own life that leave him scrambling to catch up to the present.

He’s not so sure that there’s much to be done about it, though.

He spars with the other crew members, stays up helping Yinxiang sort through her herbs in the moonlight, offers to take first watch at night when he senses that the weather is particularly volatile--no matter what he does, he always wakes in a breathless panic, two, three hours after falling asleep.

Sometimes, he opens his eyes to find his jaw clenched so hard that his head aches from the force of it, the taste of copper in his mouth from where he’s bitten the inside of his cheek raw. He’d woken the previous night when his dream had ended with the stopping of his own heart, curled on his side with his hand shoved beneath his pillow, his fingers clenched around Tomo’s Vision until the metal edges had left cuts in his palm.

In the light of day, he can see the messy job he’s done of wrapping it up, the layers of bandages crooked and uneven against his hand.

“What happened there?”

Kazuha instinctively tilts away from the sound of Juza’s voice, covering his bandaged hand on reflex. It alarms him, almost, that he hadn’t heard Juza’s approach, that he’d already lost himself in the five, ten minutes it’d taken the man to leave and come back.

His uneasy motion doesn’t go unnoticed, and Juza studies him in a way highly reminiscent of the way that Beidou looks at him, sometimes. He’s just as perceptive as she is, and Kazuha feels his walls go up, the way he retreats from the other’s discerning stare.

“Just an accident,” Kazuha hears himself say automatically, dipping his head with what he hopes is an appropriately regretful expression, then sends an unsubtle glance to Juza’s right, sidestepping towards another topic entirely.

Juza’s hand is easily large enough to close around the merchant’s arm entirely, and is more than enough to prevent the man’s escape, were his hands not already bound by a healthy amount of rope. Kazuha hasn’t seen him since the day he’d successfully helped Beidou apprehend him, but the man seems to recognize him anyway, his eyes narrowing as he looks Kazuha over with interest.

“If it isn’t the Inazuma boy…” he mutters to himself, so lowly that even Kazuha strains to hear it. The merchant examines him, his eyes moving over Kazuha’s form so slowly that Kazuha feels his neck prickle with discomfort.

“Alright, that’s enough of that. Look somewhere else, you rat.”

Juza positions himself firmly between them, until the merchant’s view of Kazuha is blocked off entirely by the First Mate’s broad frame. The gesture is so obviously protective that Kazuha isn’t sure what to make of it, a slow-spreading warmth curling to life in his stomach.

“It’s fine--it doesn’t bother me,” he starts, but Juza is already leading the merchant off of the boat, his grip on the man’s arm noticeably tighter.

As he steps off the boat himself, he feels the details of the world start to grow fuzzy, a familiar fog softening the edges of his thoughts, filling in the involuntary gaps in his mind.

A part of him worries about this, that Juza might not be pleased that his companion is so absent--but either Kazuha is spectacularly successful at disguising his moments of inattention, or Juza simply doesn’t care. When the world finally settles into something solid again, they’re standing in front of the Third Round Knockout, the name tugging faintly at Kazuha’s recognition when he reads the characters printed on the sign.

The lanterns at the entrance have been lit by an unseen hand, the sun low enough in the sky that its light barely reaches through the clouds. He’s lost one hour, maybe two, in the time he’d spent following Juza around, and he closes his eyes for a moment too long on his next blink, taking in a shaky breath to steady himself.

“Here we are,” the man says cheerfully, pushing open the door and fairly urging Kazuha in. “I always bring the fresh blood here, after their first successful trip. Would’ve brought you last time, but you were pretty sick then, I think.”

Kazuha remembers that--he’d been violently ill on his first return voyage here, his body rapidly discovering that the safety and control of steering his own, small boat by wind was an entirely different experience from the independent pace of the Alcor. By the time he’d been able to stand without feeling like a bowl of grass jelly, they’d already left for the Guyun Islands.

“I appreciate the thought. It would hardly have made a good impression on the owners, were I to have decorated their establishment with the contents of my stomach.”

“Aye, that’s the right idea. Good judgement, unlike a certain someone on our ship--ever hear how this place got its name?”

Kazuha shakes his head, and Juza’s expression fairly lights up. Evidently, he’s rather pleased to have found someone new to tell his stories to--the other members of the crew have taken to hiding whenever he gets particularly nostalgic, having heard his tales enough times to recite them from memory.

Even if this were old news to him, Kazuha thinks he still wouldn’t mind. He likes it better this way, having ample opportunity to listen and little reason to speak.

Juza only pauses in his story twice--once to order their drinks, and again to push Kazuha’s proffered coin away. 

“It’s on me, kid. For helping me out earlier.”

Kazuha decides not to point out that he hadn’t actually contributed anything, instead wrapping his hands around his cup and taking the smallest of sips from it, the taste of rice wine sweet against his tongue. Somewhere in between hearing about Liushi’s epic struggle with unemployment and the evaporation of the contents of his cup, some of the other crew members drop by.

He vaguely recognizes their presence, their accompanying chatter blending into a pleasant buzz. It’s only when he hears his name that he comes back to himself, that he blinks once, twice, to find them staring at him curiously, awaiting an answer to the question he hadn’t heard.

“I wasn’t…” Briefly, he wonders if he can brush his way past this, if he can supply an answer general enough that it might work.

“We’ve been taking bets--on whether or not you could defeat the Captain in a spar,” Sea Drake pitches in to elaborate, perhaps sensing the confusion on his face. “Most of the crew, myself included, think she’d break you in half. But Furong thinks you’ve got a shot--she keeps bringing up the time you tossed me over the railing.”

“Oh. Once again, I apologize,” Kazuha hastens to add, pinkening slightly at the reminder of his earlier sparring incident, but Sea Drake waves his contrition away, unbothered by the mention of it.

“Nah, that was on me. I underestimated you--where’d a kid like you pick something like that up?”

A strange pressure rises in his chest then, words heavy in his mouth. He’s never shared much about himself with the crew before, and eventually, they’d simply learned to stop asking. But now, perhaps from the alcohol loosening his tongue or the slow, sleepy warmth of the room, he feels compelled to answer. 

“My father trained me,” he says quietly, turning his eyes downwards. 

He doesn’t elaborate, but he knows that they must be able to guess what comes next--there are only a few options, after all, that would allow him to be here, alone and employed aboard a foreign ship at seventeen.

Juza stills beside him, the expression on his face turning fleetingly soft in understanding, but in truth, Kazuha doubts that this is worth his sympathy. He and his father had never been particularly close--as hard as he tries, he can’t remember a moment that took place outside of the training room, that ended any other way than him wincing on the floorboards of his family manor, his bloodied hands leaving marks on the wood. 

Mostly, he remembers the brushwork painting that had hung on his father’s wall, the hours Kazuha spent looking at it after he’d given up on trying to pry the emotion from his father’s expressionless face. It’d been a picture of the sea, of white-crested waves threatening to swallow the coast, birds scattering in its wake. 

His father had spoken of responsibility and duty, the core principles of the Kaedehara name. Kazuha had lain on the floor, trying to find a position that didn’t bite into his bruises, wondering if the ocean sounded the same way it looked.

It does.

Kazuha pulls himself from the memory to find that the crew is still watching him, a kind of soft regret hanging in the air. He ducks his head under the attention, which is when Juza’s hand comes to rest against his hair, his hand heavy and warm.

“You did pretty good for yourself, boy. I’d have been proud, if that were me.”

The silence breaks at that, the topic slowly shifting away into another sea yarn, another story for another time, and Kazuha is left looking down at his hands, trying to swallow back the flutter in his chest. It’s then that Beidou slides into the empty seat to his right, unhooking her drinking gourd from her waist and dropping it on the counter, apparently familiar enough with the tavern’s owners to trust them to fill it up.

“I’m surprised Juza hasn’t talked those sensitive ears of yours straight off,” she says easily, ignoring Juza’s low rumble of protest in favor of shooting Kazuha an easy grin.

“He speaks of interesting things,” Kazuha states plainly, although he’s certain that Beidou’s teasing is simply in good spirit. “It’s an enjoyable experience, listening to him.”

“Only because you’ve got the patience of a saint. You’re spoiling the old man, you know? You should return the favor to him with some of your poetry, one of these days.”

Kazuha sneaks a glance at Juza’s expression, which seems torn between hesitation and a hastily plastered-on attempt at encouragement, and he gets the impression that Juza isn’t exactly the type to be fond of Kazuha’s brand of musings.

“I think I shall spare him of that fate.”

“The kid’s on my side, Captain Beidou. You aren’t turning him against me so easily.”

Beidou’s boot slides under the space below Kazuha’s chair to kick lightly at Juza’s leg. “Hey! Don’t forget that I found him first. He’s mine, fair and square.”

He isn’t certain if being claimed in this fashion is meant to be a positive thing or not, but he sinks into the comfort of it anyways, parts of his awareness filtering away as he fades into the background of their conversation. The hour is late enough that he’d be tired even without his recent insomnia, and at some point, he finds himself dropping away, unconsciously leaning against Beidou’s arm.

Beidou pauses when she feels the weight of his head, looking down with a bemused grin.

“Hey, Juza, pick up the pace,” she commands her First Mate, interrupting the middle of his tale about Beidou’s Vision. “You’re literally putting the kid to sleep.”

That pulls Kazuha back down to earth, rather instantly. He jerks upright, nearly knocking over his empty wine cup in the process, hastily bowing his head in Juza’s direction.

“Ah, it isn’t that,” he hastens to say, hoping to rectify his apparent disrespect. “I just...haven’t been sleeping well.”

His second admission of the night--if he were any less tired, he’d find it in himself to be concerned about this.

Beidou snorts from beside him, reaching over to slide the cup out of his way, leaving the counter before him empty. “No kidding. You look dead on your feet--it’s not exactly hard to tell. You should get some rest.”

She nods towards the space she’s cleared for him, with the kind of firm set to her expression that tells Kazuha that she isn’t about to accept a refusal. He doubts he can manage one, anyways, with how difficult it is to string more than two thoughts at a time together.

Still, he glances cautiously about himself as he shyly folds his arms on the countertop, hoping he doesn’t draw too much attention as he pillows his head on his arms, turning his face into the cover of the darkness as he closes his eyes.

He won’t sleep, not really--even after all of this, he still can’t trust himself to give in amongst others, not when he knows how badly he will wake. But he’ll stay like this for now, suspended in the halfway point between here and his dreams, in a place where he can’t be disturbed.

There’s the rustle of fabric from beside him, and then a warmth as Beidou’s traveling cloak envelops his thin frame, soft cloth pooling around his shoulders. The weight of him drags him down--in a good way--anchors him until he no longer feels the danger of drifting off, and in the space of this singular moment, surrounded by cursing, drunken sailors, he allows himself a quiet peace.

Kazuha opens his eyes to an unusual calm.

He doesn’t know where he is at first, and even after he waits for one, two beats of his heart, the image becomes no clearer--he’s somewhere warm, in a hazy sort of scene that seems to shift with each of his breaths, sunlight filtering in through the trees.

There’s a cool touch beneath his fingers, and further inspection reveals the damp cloth they’re curled against, cold water gently seeping from the hem. He spends a long time staring down at his hands in his lap, at the miraculously unblemished skin of his right hand, if only because something about it feels wrong.

“Hey--you’re so quiet. Don’t tell me you’re still angry with me.”

He snaps his eyes upwards, and finds Tomo’s gaze looking into his own, the other’s expression caught between confusion and a grimace as he tilts his head to the side with a wince. One of his hands comes up to touch gingerly at a bleeding gash in his head, and Kazuha instinctively reaches out, batting the other’s rough fingers away, replacing it with a careful swipe of the cloth.

“...angry?” he asks cautiously, wiping at the dried blood on Tomo’s head until the skin is clean, easing the pressure of his touches whenever Tomo winces. “I’m not. Should I be?”

Tomo studies him for a long moment, an unreadable emotion in his eyes. Kazuha blinks back at him, watches the way Tomo’s irises flicker between blue and purple and nothing at all, like they can no longer decide what color they’re supposed to be.

“I mean, I don’t want you to be mad, of course. But you were really laying into me, just a second ago. And then you got quiet, all of the sudden. So...I got kind of worried, you know?”

“I believe you are the cause for more concern, at the moment,” Kazuha answers wryly, with a particularly hard dab at Tomo’s wound, and Tomo lets out a strangled squawk, lifting an arm in feeble self-defense.

“Alright, alright, I get it! Lesson learned, I shouldn’t have jumped off of the cliff.”

Ah.

Kazuha pauses, uncertain of what Tomo is referring to--as far as he knows, Tomo has never done anything that reckless before. But then again, it’s entirely in keeping with what he knows of the other, and he levels Tomo with the flattest look he can muster, twisting around behind him to reach for the bandages.

He stops when his hand touches the roll of cloth, spends a half-second wondering why and how he’d done that--how he’d known they were there to begin with. Staring at the bandages, however, does little to clarify this, and Kazuha blinks once, twice, and the air around him shifts once more, his doubts suddenly tucking themselves away beneath a heavy wave. 

“And yet you did--for what purpose?”

Tomo shrugs, lets out a pained chuckle until what must be his cracked ribs cuts him off in a faint gasp. “I had to. Those monsters were about to eat Azuki. There was only one way to get down fast enough, and...well, I survived.”

At the confused twist of Kazuha’s expression, Tomo laughs again, stopping only when Kazuha lays hand on his forehead and begins swiftly checking him for signs of a concussion, or perhaps brain damage.

“Look, isn’t she cute? Tama will be happy to have a friend.”

With his free hand, Tomo reaches out to his side, dropping his fingers into the fur of a tiny black kitten. She lets out the tiniest of mews, blindly turning to nuzzle at Tomo’s palm, her small tail curling around his wrist.

“I named her Azuki--’cause she’s small. You know, like--”

“Yes, Tomo. Like a bean.”

Tomo considers him, the way that Kazuha is trying and failing to assemble his features into a properly admonishing expression, how hard he’s struggling to stay stern with Tomo in this moment.

“On second thought, maybe I should have named her Kazu--”

Kazuha lets out a sound of deep exasperation, leaning forwards until his forehead touches against Tomo’s shoulder, mostly to hide the helpless smile that tugs at his lips, the gentle flush that touches at his cheeks. He turns his head to the side after a moment, until his ear is pressed against Tomo’s chest, and he listens to the steady beat of his heart.

“Easy there, Kazuha. I’m still a bit banged up.”

Tomo leans his head back until it thumps against the tree he’s resting against. One of his hands snakes out, taking Kazuha’s free hand in his own, the warmth of Tomo’s larger palm fully enveloping Kazuha’s own.

Kazuha hasn’t felt a warmth like this in a long time--his mind stutters here, stops altogether when he tries to determine how long--and he shuts his eyes against it, sinking fully against the solid weight of Tomo’s body.

“You should have waited for me,” he hears himself say, and it surprises him, how bitter the words are, like he’s been waiting to say them for so long. “I could have helped.”

 A phantom memory twists in his mind, struggles to rise to the surface. Although these words are right, everything else is wrong. He isn’t reliving this scene, like he does with so many others, because this simply never happened--Kazuha doesn’t know what this is.

His companion lets out a soft hum, shifting Kazuha’s weight slightly to the right to expose the bare skin of his chest, the fabric of his haori torn away by his tumble through tangled branches and sharp rocks. He guides Kazuha’s hand upwards, places it over what Kazuha sees there--a jagged lightning-burn scar, barely an inch away from his heart.

Kazuha stares hard at the mark, at the way it’s stopped just shy of being fatal, as if its target had been pulled away at just the right instant, spared from certain death by a quicker hand.

His throat is so tight that his next swallow is painful, the ache of it spreading across his body. The warmth around him evaporates, even as Tomo’s soft smile remains unchanged, and an emptiness opens itself in Kazuha’s chest, gnawing at the pit of his stomach.

The feeling comes slowly at first, like the flicker of a candle, then all at once--a longing so deep that it hurts to even breathe, the feeling of forever reaching for this perfect moment, and the knowing, now that he’s found it, that this can never be real.

“I did,” Tomo answers, his voice gentle and his eyes trusting, irises split between the colors of the evening sky. He squeezes Kazuha’s hand, gratitude and affection and something that Kazuha refuses to name tangled in the same motion. “You helped. And now I’m here.”

The autumn wind blows, rippling across the surface of the dream like waves in a pond, and Kazuha wakes up.

It takes him entirely too long to realize that Beidou is saying something to him.

He looks at her, watches the soundless movement of her lips, the way her grin melts away in between his steady blinks, settling into something decisively concerned. Her words trail off, and Kazuha recognizes the pause as a serious one, knows he needs to offer up a response in order to fill the silence.

“I’m...fine,” he manages to say, a not entirely coherent part of him hoping that it’s enough.

If anything, the frown on her face deepens even further, her hands coming to rest on his shoulders in a steady weight. He tilts his head idly to watch her fingers dig into his skin, and it’s strange how distant the sensation is--he barely feels the pressure of it, even though he’s certain that Beidou’s grip is stronger than this.

She shakes him slightly, the motion tumbling the thoughts about in his skull, and Kazuha blinks once, twice, and the world comes back to him at once. The color bleeds into his vision immediately, the sound of the sea and the wind and Beidou’s voice so suddenly present that he feels dizzy hearing it.

“--Kazuha, do you know what I said?”

The words filter in, trickling into his awareness one at a time, and Kazuha closes his eyes for several seconds on his next blink. He’s tired---too tired to have this conversation, too tired to conduct himself in the way he’s supposed to.

“I don’t,” he murmurs frankly, and her grip on him tightens, the sound of her heart picking up at his admission.

Her hand comes up, pressing itself against his forehead, and he leans into the touch, unsure of what she thinks she’ll find. He isn’t sick--there’s nothing really, truly wrong with him,  no fever to be treated, no wound to be bandaged. Everything that’s happened to him is all in his head, is all because of his head.

“Damn it,” she says quietly, and then her hand slides around to his upper back, gently pushing forwards. 

Kazuha follows along, feels too weightless and afloat to protest, and when he shuts his eyes, the world warps beneath his feet. A second later, Beidou is pushing him into a chair, and he fairly collapses into it, his hands automatically reaching up to catch himself on the edge of the table.

He stares down at the backs of his hands, at the bandages wrapped around his right palm--he hasn’t changed the wrappings in over a week, and the fabric is starting to peel, the cuts on his hand itching with irritation. 

Beidou is moving about, and she sounds somewhere far away from him, six feet of sea separating the two of them, but when he forces himself to look up, he sees her back in perfect clarity. She’s turned away from him, reaching for something in the cabinet, and it’s this that finally tells him where they are.

“...Captain?” he asks softly, looking about the empty kitchen. It’s unusual to find no one else here--in a ship full of sailors, most of them twice his size, someone is always down here at any point in the day, searching for sustenance. 

Perhaps it’s simply late enough that the rest of the ship has retired for the night--Kazuha wouldn’t be surprised, if that were the case, if it were a completely different time than what he last remembers. All of the hours are starting to blend together, after all, the borders between them dissipating until everything simply feels like one long, eternal day.

Beidou doesn’t answer him, evidently preoccupied with her task as she removes a bowl from the cupboards, opening the large pot to her right to fill it up. It isn’t much, just plain rice, but the sight of food turns unpleasantly at Kazuha’s stomach, twisting his gut in a way that has him shaking his head even before she places the bowl in front of him.

“I’m not--”

“Don’t try that on me, kid. I know you weren’t at dinner last night. Or this night, for that matter. When’s the last time you ate at all?”

Kazuha carefully avoids her gaze as she puts a pair of chopsticks in front of him, unable to think of an answer that won’t give him away. He’s hardly qualified to offer up a guess, mostly because he himself doesn’t even know the answer to her question, and he suspects that Beidou has been present at a lot more meals than he has.

It isn’t his fault--at least, he doesn’t think. The last thing he properly remembers is lying awake in his room, his fingers tracing endless circles in the cool surface of Tomo’s Vision, half of him still stuck in that sunlit fantasy of their shared life, the one with the little black kitten and all the green tea candies Tomo could possibly stomach. 

Somehow, it doesn’t hurt to remember these kinds of dreams, not in the way that the ones on the Tenshukaku do. Rather, he simply feels empty when he thinks of them, carefully numb in a way that he can’t describe, and the sensation--or rather, the lack of it--masks any appetite he might have had.

When it becomes clear that Beidou is still expecting a response, he attempts a sort of diversionary tactic instead, picking up his chopsticks in an automatic motion. Nothing about this bowl of rice is particularly appealing to him, but he moves some of it into his mouth anyways, the grains dry against his even drier tongue. The food sticks in his throat when he swallows it down, and he can feel the way it settles heavily in his stomach.

He covers his mouth with his unbandaged hand, turning his head away when he shuts his eyes, fighting back a dizzying wave of sickness.

“I know. It’ll suck at first. But you do need to eat--take it slow, until you’re done.”

From the tone of her voice, he can tell that she has no intention of leaving this table before he does, and he can hardly find it in himself to argue when he knows that she’s right. Even underneath his stomach’s initial revolt, the rest of him is already feeling the benefits--he feels more grounded now, a little less like he has to cling to the table to stop himself from drifting away, and the tremble in his hands has stopped.

“Thank you,” he hears himself say, somewhere after half of the rice has disappeared, and something in his voice must sound stronger now, because the tension in Beidou’s posture seems to relax. 

“Nah, don’t thank me for something like this. I’m just looking out for you. We all are, I mean.”

We? Kazuha blinks, lifting his gaze to properly meet hers, and the concern on her face feels like it lessens by a fraction, seeing him finally look at her.

“If something’s up, we’ve got a pretty good medic right here on the ship. And if not that, well, Liyue’s got something for everyone, too.”

“I am not ill,” he responds quickly, because it’s true, in most senses of the word. He doubts that they have a salve for the chill in his bones, or an herb that will send him into a dreamless sleep. “This is...something that will pass.”

It will pass--it has to.

Beidou watches him through narrowed eyes, and he can sense the heat of her gaze at the top of his head as he goes through the rest of the rice, chewing each bite in mechanical motions. 

“Alright. I won’t push it,” she says at last, folding her arms over her chest. “Archons know you’re stubborn. And you’ve got every right to be--you’ve been on your own for a long time, I can tell. All I’m saying is...the crew’s here for you, you know.”

Kazuha closes his eyes, unsure of what to make of the fragile sensation that flutters in his chest, the faintest part of him that likes the sound of what she’s saying, that keeps reaching out when there’s nothing to find.

“I know.”

He tries to settle into an absent sort of routine, after that. At the very least, he checks back into the present more often, forcing himself into the bare minimum. He eats enough to avoid requiring another direct confrontation, and spends enough time out of his room that the crew won’t ask questions. Occasionally, he wakes halfway and finds himself faithfully helping another crew member with a job, sees his fingers sorting weaponry and counting Mora and tying knots.

Mostly, though, he lets the world fade, stands at a distance and watches his life play out in between tired blinks.

He’s curled on his side, facing the wall when he hears Beidou’s first footfall on the stair, her steps unusually careful. As soon as her approach is too close to ignore, Kazuha closes his eyes in an attempted recreation at sleep, but even still, he senses the way she hesitates outside of his closed door, hears her adjusting uncomfortably at her gloves and checking the belts on her clothing.

She’s stalling for time, he realizes distantly, debating on whether or not to wake him, and the scene is very familiar, all of the sudden, a shadow of that first night in Ritou.

“Kazuha,” she tries, her voice low enough that he wouldn’t have woken if he were truly asleep, and it’s strange to hear her so subdued.

He should answer her, he knows, but his body doesn’t want to move, and his mind is still adrift, too far away to command him to do so. Instead, he goes perfectly still, keeping his eyes shut even as the knob turns and a sliver of light spills into the room behind him.

The floorboards creak beneath Beidou’s boots, then shift with her weight as she lowers herself carefully to sit at the edge of his bed. For a long moment, neither of them move, and the silence stretches on for so long that Kazuha wonders if Beidou is even actually here, or if this is another product of his increasingly fragile mind.

Then, she lets out the softest of sighs, and a gentle hand drops into his hair, fingers reaching out to brush wisps of hair away from his face. If Kazuha were more aware, he might have flinched away from the touch, as sudden as it had come, but his body recognizes it as Beidou’s hand almost instantly, and his breaths even out before she has time to notice the pause.

“I wish you would let me help you,” Beidou confesses, to what she must assume is his sleeping form, because he’s never heard her voice sound like this, so quiet in its resignation. 

It startles Kazuha, how suddenly he wants this too--his heart stutters in his chest, an almost painful pressure threatening to rise up within him. He hasn’t felt anything this much in so long, and the warmth of it is so intense that it trickles beneath his skin, the numbness that coats his every thought cracking open like ice.

He wants to tell her the truth, he thinks. Maybe not all of it, not the private moments he shares with Tomo in his mind, not about the impossible future he cradles so close in his thoughts.

But maybe he can tell her about the parts that unsettle him the most, how he passes through the days in such a distant blur, how he never feels here anymore, even when he wants to be, how he’s accidentally become so effective at putting up walls that he no longer knows how to take them down.

He swallows hard, his fingers curling slightly from where his hand is still beneath his pillow, the motion bringing Tomo’s Vision close to his touch. Kazuha thinks, suddenly, of a red-leafed day, of how much easier it’d been to exist as a wanderer, moving freely between people and places without attachment. 

Of how it’d begun and ended with Tomo, the way he’d learned to open up his heart.

His throat tightens, and the words won’t come, the things he wants to say evaporating into the silence. The rare vulnerability between them stretches on for one second, then two, then disappears all at once, and Beidou’s hand leaves his head, the warmth of her touch flickering out like a light.

She stands up, slipping out of his room and closing the door behind her quietly, with enough of a pause that she maybe looks back.

Kazuha lays very still, and doesn’t think that he sleeps--he doesn’t dream, either. But in the hours that go by, he’s imagining it--what it might feel like to let Beidou in.

They’re still frozen, by the time Kazuha reaches the top of the steps.

At first, he simply holds his breath, looking between the three shadows of his memory, each of his heartbeats stretching on the longer that he waits. This is something new, a situation he doesn’t recognize, and the unfamiliarity of it makes him tense as he tries to picture what this might turn into.

Perhaps the floor will open up beneath him and he’ll fall away, or he’ll turn and one of Raiden’s men will have snuck behind him in his moment of distraction, ending his life early as he bleeds out on the steps. 

But when he looks down, the marble beneath his feet is more solid than ever, and the space behind him is open and clear.

Tentatively, he dares to step forwards, inching his way over the border of the throne room. It’s quiet, silent in a way that it’s never been, the rumble of thunder absent from the air, the sounds of battle removed from the picture entirely.

All he hears are his own footsteps, one after another, slowly closing the distance between himself and Tomo’s back.

His heart speeds up, the closer he gets, his breath coming in shallow with disbelief, and when he reaches out to grasp at the back of Tomo’s haori, his fingers tremble so hard that he nearly misses it--after all this time, so many tries, he finally, really holds on.

His hand tangles in the red cloth, and then he moves all the way forwards, pressing the rest of himself against Tomo’s back, the scent of green tea and gentle sun enveloping his senses.

“Tomo,” he says, and although he’s not certain anyone but himself hears it--

Tomo unfreezes, leaning into his touch, and Kazuha chokes on his next breath, almost frantic as he takes one, two steps back, pulling Tomo away with him. He looks over Tomo’s shoulder at Raiden, half-expecting for things to end here, to awaken in an electric jolt, but she remains perfectly still, energy forever gathering in her palm.

Her form gets smaller as Kazuha leads a willing Tomo back down the steps, his own gait slightly unsteady with how light he feels, and he grips harder at Tomo’s haori to keep himself here. He shuts his eyes, willing the pressure in his chest to subside enough to loosen his tongue, to allow him to speak.

“Tomo,” he says again, just to hear it for himself--to hear it while it still has a reason to be said--and his friend looks at him then, his eyes a steady violet, his face warm. “I want to talk to you.”

“You looking for the Captain?”

Kazuha turns his head, finds Juza staring at him with a mixture of bemusement and concern, something he’s getting used to seeing directed his way, as of late. Behind the man, the afternoon sun has started to set, signaling the evening’s approach.

He doesn’t know how many hours he’s lost, and can’t find it in himself to figure it out. He isn’t even sure what he’s doing here, having only just blinked in to find himself standing on the deck, but he latches onto Juza’s suggestion, giving the First Mate a nod.

“She gave the crew the day off--said she had some business to take care of on her own, anyways. You might be able to catch up to her, if you’re quick enough.”

Juza nods in the direction of Liyue Harbor, and it strikes Kazuha, then, how little of this place he’s truly seen, how long he’s been here without being here, how many seconds and hours and days of his life have gone without him. The wind changes direction, blowing the scent of warmth and spice towards him, and he unconsciously takes a step towards it, his limbs unusually shaky beneath him, as if he’s just learning to walk.

Maybe he had been looking for Beidou. 

There’s an uncertain flutter in his chest, a lightness within him suddenly itching to escape, little leftover sparks of distant emotion from his dream. Tomo’s gentle smile melts against the background of his thoughts, softening the sharp sting of remembering his name, and Kazuha feels it slowly at first, then all at once--the sensation that this is an ending, somehow.

And here’s the beginning, a faraway, barely coherent realization of his. It’s simply occurred to him, suddenly, that this, this living without being, is not the way he wants to be.

And that if he can make it to her now without drifting, without being swept away in the tide, perhaps he doesn’t have to.

The First Mate lets him pass in silence, but Kazuha can sense his gaze on his back. The feeling stays there for a moment, the man’s concern creeping over him like a shroud. Kazuha almost wants to tell him not to worry, not to reach out for him any longer when there will soon be nothing to find. 

In another blink, he’s well away from the ship, his feet taking him down the crowded paths of the city. It’s almost overwhelming, the blend of sight and sound--in the past, he’d always found Liyue to be muted, muffled by all the layers he’d sunken beneath.

Kazuha closes his eyes, ignores the way that his head spins at even that, and tries to filter out the buzz of the crowd, listening for the telltale confidence of Beidou’s walk--

“You there--boy!”

He looks up instinctively, although he can’t be sure the voice was addressing him, a faint disappointment tugging at his gut at the interruption. A moment later, one of the Millelith comes hurrying out towards him, short of breath and apparently frantic. 

“Are you...alright?” he asks, debating on whether to reach for the man or not, but the guard straightens up almost immediately, giving Kazuha a steady stare.

“You’re part of the Crux fleet, right?”

When Kazuha nods in response, the guard sighs in relief, reaching into his pouch and fishing through it, finally extracting a thin, metal object--and Kazuha feels his blood run cold, the world rushing back to him in painful clarity.

“Where did you get this?”

His own voice is so soft to his ears that he thinks he might have to repeat himself, his fingers curling around the hairpin in his palm. The tassel at the end sways slightly with the motion, brushing against the back of his hand, a sight he’s seen mirrored countless times when the pin had been stuck in Beidou’s hair.

“The path--the path to the west. I was patrolling on my usual route, and I found this. Isn’t this your Captain’s? I thought that woman was near invincible, she’s a living legend! What’s out there that’s strong enough to take down her?”

The guard continues on, his ramblings turning more frantic, but Kazuha doesn’t wait to hear the rest of it, already turning towards the direction the man had said he’d come from. A familiar panic swells in his chest, his grip on the hairpin tightening when he brings it close to the rapid beat of his heart.

“I...have to go,” he interrupts the other, and his Vision glows at his back as wind gathers at his feet, pushing him into a sprint. 

He slips easily through the crowds until he breaks through the main harbor, staring up at the mountain path ahead of him. Kazuha knows enough to recognize that it leads to nothing but forest at the top, and from where he’s standing, he can see no signs of battle on the road before him.

But even still--

then there’s Tomo--or at least, there’s his back

Kazuha swallows hard, abandoning his reservations as he starts up the mountain path, his heart spasming in his chest the closer he gets. He’s almost more afraid of what he might see there, he realizes, if it’ll be like Ritou, four men collapsed around Beidou’s feet, her usual grin wide on her face, or if it’ll be--

and Beidou’s hand leaves his head, the warmth of her touch flickering out like a light

It almost makes him stop here, his fear so thick that he nearly chokes on it, bitter against his tongue. His walls want to go up, to protect him from what he so badly doesn’t want to see, but his body has long learned how to continue on without him.

Without his permission, he takes one, two steps forwards, and reaches the top.

“You should have waited for me,” he hears himself say, and it surprises him, how bitter the words are, like he’s been waiting to say them for so long. “I could have helped.”

The clearing is empty, when Kazuha bursts into it.

He can’t hear anything over the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, can’t sense any human presence over the crawl of anxiety against his skin. There’s nothing, and his breath leaves him in a slow shudder as the images he’d been unwillingly sheltering in his thoughts begin to dissipate, relief seeping into chest.

His muscles untense, exhaustion catching up to him all at once as the panic begins to die away, and then the leaves rustle from somewhere behind him as a knife whistles through the air.

He hasn’t eaten in a day, hasn’t slept in two--but his reflexes are still sharp enough, burned into him from a lifetime of combat. He twists out of the way so that the knife avoids his heart, his right hand going to the hilt of his sword as his left is sliced open by the blade’s path. The knife’s edge drags against his forearm and up to his elbow, then embeds itself into the trunk of the tree behind him.

Kazuha takes in a sharp breath at the pain that sears across his left arm, his fingers dropping the bloodied hairpin in the grass at just how badly the wound burns. He can tell the cut is deep, but he doesn’t have the time to examine it--his assailant drops from the trees, bearing the familiar crest of the Shogunate on his clothes.

“You’re…” he feels his vision sway at the realization, the fact that they’d found him even here. He doesn’t understand it--as powerful as the Raiden Shogun is, she shouldn’t have had the power to follow him all this way, across so many miles of sea.

He struggles to process it, his mind fishing for the pieces, but the man across from him has already drawn his sword, leaping at him with a direct strike to his left. Kazuha just barely manages to jerk out of the way, wind swelling at his feet and pushing them apart, buying himself precious seconds to grab at his own weapon, his left hand trembling from the strain of being forced around the edge of his sheath.

Energy gathers around his blade as he draws it in full, a single slash of wind following its arc, the impact of the breeze rattling against the trees. His opponent is forced back by the initial blast, his side crashing into the ground at an awkward angle, and the skin of his shoulder sliced open by the wind. 

It’s not enough, though--Kazuha can see the way his normally precise control over his abilities has slipped away from him, how the technique so often used to end battles in an instant can now do little more than stall for time.

And time isn’t a resource he still has, the wound on his arm pulsing with each of his breaths, dizzying spots darting across his vision whenever he blinks. His attacker has recovered from Kazuha’s first attack now, is charging at him in a way that Kazuha isn’t so sure he can defend. When he forces himself upwards on another Anemo current, the world sways violently before him, throws off his aim when he plunges his sword back down, his next strike landing somewhere around the man’s legs.

Even still, it’s enough to throw him off balance, to toss him backwards and expose the vulnerable side of his neck. They’re still close enough to each other that Kazuha can reach it--he turns the sharp side of his blade outwards, takes one, two steps forwards--

The ground feels like it falls away before his feet, his body pitching forwards against his will, his limbs trembling so hard that they can no longer hold him up. He shudders against the grass, the gash in his arm burning with that same, unnatural heat, pumping a slowly seeping fire into his veins, and that’s when Kazuha understands that this battle has already been lost.

“Took long enough,” the man rasps from above him, staggering to his feet and spitting blood into the grass beside Kazuha’s head, sheathing his sword. “I thought you said it acted quickly.”

“It’s not my fault if you didn’t use enough. I did give you a whole bottle, free of charge. And I brought you the boy, didn’t I? Just as promised.”

Kazuha hears a vague grunt of assent, watches as his assailant pulls his knife free from the trunk, wiping off Kazuha’s blood from the blade, along with a silvery, metallic-looking substance. He isn’t thinking about that, though, isn’t paying attention to the poison filtering through his bloodstream--he recognizes the second voice, should know its owner--

A surprisingly smooth hand fists in his hair, jerks his head up in a dizzying wave and lets him stare upwards and into the familiar face of the Liyuen merchant, the one he’d helped Beidou capture so many nights ago. Kazuha closes his eyes, cursing his own ignorance, and the merchant chuckles at the recognition, his free hand coming up to stroke almost gently at Kazuha’s cheek.

“You really are a pretty thing, now that I’m up so close,” he hears the man say, somewhere from off far away, and Kazuha tries to pull his head away, but his eyelids are so heavy now, each blink dragging him dangerously close to nothingness. “If the Raiden Shogun wasn’t offering such a nice price for your head, I might have kept you for myself.”

“Hey. Quit playing with your food and search him. Take his Vision and his weapons, and then you can keep whatever else you find.”

The man lets out a sigh of mock despair, and then a rough prod in Kazuha’s stomach forces him onto his back, his body helpless against the movement. 

The shift in position immediately cloaks Kazuha’s sense in a nauseous haze, enough that he can’t resist the hand that snakes tenderly down his side and stops at his waist. The merchant takes his time with him, deft fingers undoing the ties of Kazuha’s sword, then the Vision at his back, tossing both items into the grass behind him.

Kazuha watches them drop away through bleary eyes, feels the merchant’s touch glide upwards, the tips of his fingers slipping beneath Kazuha’s scarf, ghosting just barely beneath the open part of his clothes. 

“Don’t--” Kazuha hisses, a different kind of panic twisting at his stomach as the merchant’s hand closes around Tomo’s Vision, and he weakly pushes at the invading touch with his good hand, only to find his wrist pinned almost playfully against the grass.

“Hm? Must be valuable to you,” the man murmurs, holding Tomo’s Vision up to the light. “I know all about these--people love to buy these things, you know? The Tianquan herself once considered it a worthy business venture.” 

Kazuha feels himself go very still as he watches Tomo’s Vision disappear into the fabric of the man’s pocket, his mind going carefully blank. The gash in his left arm burns, but he forces it to support him anyway, shoving himself upwards as he lunges desperately at the man, who is caught off guard enough to be knocked back by Kazuha’s pitiful attack.

“Fuck, get him off of me--”

The man’s panicked yelp is cut abruptly short as a strong hand fists in the back of Kazuha’s clothes, tossing him back on the grass with relative ease. A heavy boot connects with Kazuha’s stomach a second later, and the force of it makes him choke, makes his body convulse as he curls in on himself, bile rising in his throat.

Through the spots in his rapidly fading vision, he blinks up at the third man, the Millelith guard who’d brought him here to begin with.

Oh, Kazuha thinks, and not much more, because the world is starting to go dark, his breaths coming in shallow, raspy coughs. That’s--

“Don’t touch him.”

He almost doesn’t recognize Beidou’s voice with how deathly calm it is, quiet in a way that brings even the wind to a stop. It’s softer than even that moment at his bedside, but the edge in it makes the men freeze in place.

She’s somewhere behind him, sounds so far away to his warped senses, but he still recognizes her lightning as it arcs between his attackers, the glint of her claymore as she makes to dispose of the threats. Worry clenches the feeble beat of his heart when blood splatters against the grass, but none of it is hers--a moment later, she’s kneeling down by his side, perfectly unharmed, her hair loose around her shoulders.

Despite himself, Kazuha thinks he smiles.

“You’re safe,” he mumbles out on reflex, unable to suppress the words as they tumble out of him.

“I’m safe? Gods, kid--”

Kazuha feels his eyes flutter, Beidou’s arrival having effectively severed the last of the ties keeping him upright. He sees a wave of blackness at the edges of his vision, unconsciousness threatening to swallow him in a tide--it’s not too dissimilar, actually, to the way he so often drifts.

“Nope,” Beidou says, and he feels her hands on his shoulders then, her fingers digging into his cold skin as she gives him a rough shake. “Can’t let you do that. Not until I know what they’ve done to you.”

The words filter past his awareness, syllables blending together until he’s not even certain that she’d spoken to him in a real language--but he hears the shortness in her voice, anyways, the edge of panic beneath the roughness of her tone. 

Hearing her this way sends a stab of guilt through him, is enough to force himself awake, struggling against the heaviness that threatens to drag him under, his muscles trembling with the exertion of keeping himself upright when Beidou’s steady arm guides him to sit up.

He nods, or at least he thinks he does, his head falling limply against her shoulder.

“Yeah, like that. Keep sitting up, the others are on their way, alright? I’ll have Yinxiang check you out, and you can pass out if she doesn’t find anything. Sound good?”

He doesn’t answer, too focused on the sound of her voice, the way it anchors him here when he’s so tempted to drift away. Luckily, Beidou doesn’t seem to be expecting a response, only tightening her grip whenever his eyes stay closed for a moment too long or his breath pauses in his chest.

While they wait, Beidou starts on his injured arm, wrapping the deep gash in his skin as best as she can. Even the pressure she applies to stem the flow of blood feels strangely numb, a dull sensation compared to the fire snaking its way through his veins. He thinks he can hear the poison’s course through his body, almost, because each of his heartbeats is so loud that he can count the moments between each one.

It takes three for Beidou to finish wrapping his arm, and then another two before the unease in his stomach finally reaches its peak, the darkening bruise on his stomach making it impossible to suppress his convulsions. 

With the little strength he has left, he pushes Beidou away, and she barely has the time to look surprised before he twists himself to the side, unwillingly emptying the contents of his stomach onto the ground.

“Shit--” He hears her curse over the drag of his coughs against his throat, and she pulls him back against her as soon as his dry heaves subside, her fingers moving to unlatch the gourd of water from her belt. 

“Drink this,” she tries to tell him, but his body has finally spent more energy than he has to give--has already spent it daysweeks months ago--and he can barely make out the shape of what she’s holding with how dark his vision has become.

He shakes his head, his lungs seizing in an aborted inhale as he collides with her chest, his body going limp. Like this, he can hear her heartbeat too, so quick and panicked beside his steadily slowing one, and in this moment, he finds himself thinking how strange it is to be on this side of things, to be the one being reached for by a searching hand.

I want to talk to you, he thinks, a desperate wish tearing at his throat in a wet cough, the taste of copper flooding his mouth. He wants to say it, the words bubbling at the tip of his tongue, but now that he’s finally, truly, ready, he finds that he is out of time.

Too late, again.

He is so tired of being too late.

“F...forgive me,” he gasps out instead, his words bitter in how much he’s leaving unsaid.

He shuts his eyes, feels the sun set on his eternal day at last, and allows himself to be swept away with the tide.

Later, they will tell him that he slept for ten days, his weakened heart fading in and out of existence. The poison, they say, was toxic enough on its own, administered to him in a carelessly large amount--but the real damage came from his own hand, his long nights and even longer days. 

He stopped breathing twice, his tired body giving away at last, each occurrence for less than half of a minute, but certainly enough to cause concern.

After dropping what remained of the men in the Liyuen prison and recovering her stolen hairpin, Beidou sat at his side for every hour of it.

Her firm hands held him steady while they purged the poison from his system, soothed him while he, in his fever-soaked delirium, attempted to fight off the bitter herbs they forced down his bruised throat.

Kazuha remembers none of this. He was dreamless.

Miraculously, he wakes with the sun.

He feels the warm rays of light tickling against his skin, but he doesn’t believe it at first, if only because this has become a foreign thing to him, to open his eyes and find himself after the end of the night. 

His eyelids feel heavy when he struggles to see past them, and when he finally pries them open, he automatically flinches away, turning away from the sting of the light. The cotton in his head shifts with the motion, the growing headache behind his eyes changing position to an equally inconvenient place.

Kazuha is tired--his body aches, his bones ache, even his skin feels like it chafes beneath the blankets, hypersensitive to the slightest of touches. Worse is his stomach, the scrambled mess of his insides, the way that breathing feels like one singular mass of bruise.

But he is, in all respects of the word, alive.

He swallows hard, breathing out something of a laugh, and immediately regretting it when the soreness of his stomach flares up into a stabbing sort of pain. Still, he lifts a shaking arm, dropping his forearm over his stinging eyes, and it’s then that he notices he isn’t alone, right when his companion realizes much the same.

“...Kazuha?” he hears Beidou breathe out, her voice hesitant like she thinks she might be imagining things, and he forces himself to lower his arm, peeking out at her with something like a careful hesitation. Suddenly, he feels shy, almost, to be here with her like this, open and vulnerable with the last of his walls torn away.

“Ah. Hello,” he offers feebly, wincing when the words tear at the dry paper of his throat, but he can’t help the smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth anyways.

It’s impossible to suppress--the flutter in his chest, over the course of his long unconsciousness, seems to have evolved into a genuine feeling, warm enough that he thinks he might never be cold again.

Beidou looks up at the ceiling, carefully places a hand against her face to cover her expression, and Kazuha sees the way that the breath leaves her all at once. Her body shakes, with something that could be a laugh or a sob, and then the tension in her body evaporates like the morning dew. 

When she lowers her hand, the edges of her smirk are fond, too soft for her next jab to have any real bite to it.

“Hello?’ And here I thought you might have something poetic to celebrate the moment.” 

Kazuha shuts his eyes, trying not to disturb his body with further movement. “I tried,” he rasps quietly, still trying to get re-used to the sound of his voice. “Didn’t...didn’t come up with anything.”

“Lost all of your brain cells, more like.”

“That’s...cruel,” he answers without much offense, dropping his arm again once his eyes have managed to adjust to the sun. 

His limbs are so weak that he only makes it halfway, his arm falling limply against his chest before it can return to his side. He feels the thinness of his wrist as it hits his ribcage, his fingers instinctively spreading out to press over his heart.

A cold hand closes around his chest, the distant memory of a foreign hand, slipping Tomo’s Vision into a quiet pocket--

“Huh? Kid, wait--” Beidou starts, but Kazuha has already forced himself upright, ignoring the searing pain in his abdomen that wars with the dizzying sickness in his head for dominance.

He looks down at himself, at the borrowed clothing he’s wearing, the white robes that don’t belong to him, and even when he knows he won’t find anything, he touches at the pockets anyways, then at the folds of the robe, then finally at the empty space over his chest. His breaths feel short, and his body reflexively gasps for air, failing to understand the way the sudden, jerking inhales hurt him.

“I need--where is,” he stumbles over his words, struggling to string together a coherent question, even as his mind readily supplies the answer. It isn’t here, because Kazuha had lost it, after every inch he’d fought for just to keep it, he--

“Kazuha.”

Beidou’s hands find his shoulders, and then her hand slides downwards, pressing something cool and firm against his palm. Kazuha’s head jerks up, and he looks at her without seeing, feels his own helpless trembling beneath her touch as he curls his fingers around the object.

It feels impossible that he’s holding this now, that she’s recovered this for him--to anyone finding it on the merchant’s person, they’d simply assume it was yet another stolen good, or some kind of aimless trinket. But Tomo’s Vision is just as he remembers it in his hand, Beidou’s larger palm pressed against his scraped knuckles.

“How...did you--?”

“How did I know? You’re practically looking at this thing all the time, whenever you get a free moment. Doesn’t take a genius to know how important this is to you. So it’s important to me too, right?”

He looks up at her then, suddenly feeling helplessly lost, a slow shudder passing through him, and something in his face turns her expression strangely sad. She lifts her hand, smoothing his bangs away from his head, and then pulls him into a full hug, wrapping her weight around his own.

“I told you, kid. You got the crew--you’ll always have us.”

Kazuha goes very still at her touch, every muscle in his body seizing from the unfamiliarity of it. A breath goes by, then two, but she doesn’t move away, and then a longing so deep it hurts wells up from the inside, his throat tightening as his vision blurs with tears.

His hands sneak up without his permission, clinging to the fabric of Beidou’s clothes as he tries to turn his face away, right as the first full sob wracks his frame. Something in him feels like it gives away, the perfect hold of his usual restraint coming undone all at once, and now that he’s started crying, he can’t seem to stop.

He can’t remember the last time he cried like this, the last time he cried at all --not at five years old, laying on the training room floor, not at fourteen, watching his father breathe his last, not at all the times he’s been forced to reach for Tomo’s back, only ever always too late.

But this is different. Kindness, he’s starting to learn, hurts more than those things ever could, if only because he’s been without it for so long.

“Careful, there,” Beidou murmurs against his ear, her hand rubbing gentle circles into his bruised back, and he thinks her voice sounds suspiciously thick, too. “You’ll drown us both.”

Kazuha gives a watery laugh, curling in on himself when it tugs at his stomach, his last sob turning to an uneven hiccup. “Good...good thing you have a boat, then.”

“Hey, the Alcor deserves some respect. It’s a ship.”

He pulls slightly away, already missing the warmth of her touch, but bows his head with the hint of a smile. “If you insist, Captain.”

She ruffles at his hair, the gesture familiar and kind, her fingers running through his tangled locks. “Cheeky brat. Alright, then, as your Captain, I order you to go back to sleep.”

He doesn’t need an order for that--he feels drained, but not in an entirely unpleasant way, empty and light in a sense that seems more free than lost. There are still so many things he has left to say, everything he’d wanted to tell her in the moments leading up to now.

But he knows there’s a time for those conversations, at some distant point in the future.

There is no longer a way of being too late.

Kazuha wipes at his eyes with another careful sniffle, settling back under the blankets, and Beidou hesitates just before his eyes flutter shut, smoothing out the quilt above him.

“You, uh...if you’re having trouble…”

Kazuha shakes his head, lets his eyes flutter shut.

“I won’t,” he says with certainty, and slips away into the deep. 

“Man, this ‘Beidou’ sounds like a lot of fun. You said she fought Haishan for how long?”

“Twelve hours, I believe. And this was prior to receiving her Vision, as well.”

Tomo lets out a low whistle as he folds his hands behind his head, obviously impressed by the tale. Privately, Kazuha makes a note to thank Juza, for his skillful storytelling that Kazuha has more or less taken for his own, on this occasion. 

They walk down ten, maybe twelve of the Tenshukaku’s steps in contemplative silence before Tomo chimes in again.

“Damn. I could have done that. Maybe. Well, imagine if Haishan was a giant sea ganoderma--”

“Why do you hate those things so much? They’re good for you. They have many medicinal properties, which you are always desperately in need of.”

“Kazuha, they are so creepy. I can’t even tell what they’re supposed to be.”

“They’re soft. It makes them cute,” Kazuha points out in defense, much to Tomo’s apparent outrage. He thrusts open the part of his clothing a little further to expose his chest, pounding it with an indicative hand.

“I’m soft! You can’t put us in the same category.”

At this, Kazuha can’t help but laugh, a warm flush creeping into his cheeks as he waits for Tomo to readjust his clothing. When, predictably, he doesn’t, Kazuha finally reaches over, hooking his fingers into the edges of the other’s robes to pull them up again, slowly continuing down the stairs.

The Tenshukaku’s gardens are beautiful, actually, now that he has the time to appreciate them, cherry trees always in full bloom no matter the season--it makes him feel better about it, that Tomo’s found himself such a pleasant place to rest. 

In a few more echoing steps, the doors to the Tenshukaku come into view, heavy and thick and, for the moment, only capable of opening one way. This is where they’re meant to part, where their cord of fate comes to its end.

Tomo lets out a gentle sigh, tilting his head up as he studies the doors for a long moment, and Kazuha searches his expression. There’s no regret on his face, only a wistful sort of longing that matches the kind in Kazuha’s heart, the knowledge that the rest of his friend’s journey is something he’s meant to undertake alone. 

“So...this is it, then, huh?”

Kazuha looks at Tomo’s profile, the way his hair turns gold in the light of the never-setting sun, the purple of his eyes lightened to an almost blue. He spends a long second like this, memorizing these little details for himself, tucking them away somewhere safe.

“Almost,” Kazuha says, then closes the distance between them until their bodies are nearly touching, one of his hands wrapped securely around Tomo’s wrist.

It’s rare that he catches Tomo off-guard, but the other actually blinks at him, tilting his head in a confusion so characteristic that it makes Kazuha’s chest ache.

“I miss you,” he admits honestly, his voice whisper-soft, enough that Tomo only hears this because this is a dream. “And I’m sorry I didn’t ask you to stay.”

Tomo smiles sadly, his warm fingers tangling in Kazuha’s own.

“Don’t be,” he answers, leaning forwards until they’re barely a breath apart. “I always wanted you to be free.”

The distance between them narrows to nothing, closing in a kiss that tastes like green tea candies, and the world goes still for one silent moment.

Kazuha opens his eyes, finds himself on the deck of the ship.

There’s a gentle weight against his hands, which, upon further inspection, proves itself to be a paper lantern. The details filter in slowly, to avoid overwhelming him--he’d made this himself, earlier in the day, under Juza’s watchful guidance.

“Damn kid geniuses,” the First Mate shakes his head now, comparing his own lantern to Kazuha’s own, at how quickly Kazuha’s deft fingers have mastered the art of lantern making. 

“Ha! It’s Kazuha, did you expect any less? My kid’s got it all.”

Kazuha smiles under Beidou’s praise, continuing quietly with his task of inscribing careful characters into the base of his lantern. He’s heard that this is a tradition in Liyue, writing wishes on a lantern before setting it afloat.

“Speaking of, you just about done there? Not that this isn’t always a fun tradition, but damn do those Chili Chicken Skewers look good.”

“Forgive me my delay in observing the cultural practices of your homeland,” Kazuha answers wryly, but he’s satisfied with his work at last.

Beidou tilts her head in his direction, peering at the words he’s written in his native Inazuman--she can’t quite make out all of them, he realizes, and her expression is open with curiosity.

The wind picks up, the scent of maple leaves hanging in the air. It’s strange to think how natural he feels here, how he no longer shies away from the question in her gaze. He blinks once, twice, and the world sways slightly beneath his feet, but otherwise stays in place. 

Slowly, he is learning that there are ways to wander without being lost. 

Words float up, leaving him as easily as they’d come.

“I wished for a good dream,” he says quietly, and watches his lantern drift into the night.