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“What do you want from us?” Beidou snaps.
Kazuha would run out of fingers on which to count the desperate situations he’s been in. He’d run out of bones, too.
Their captors have them knelt side by side with their hands fastened snugly behind their backs. He hasn’t been able to look into Beidou’s face since they were thrown onto the floorboards of the ship, but he paints a picture with her tone and finds her hard eyes and intimidating stare.
“If it’s information, I can promise you we don’t have it,” Beidou says. “We’re passing peacefully between here and the shores of Mondstadt. If you need clarity you can probably get in touch with the church of Barbatos, but I also can’t imagine the church would be too happy to hear about this bullshit.”
“You talk a lot for someone in your position.”
Kazuha assumes this guy’s their leader, if only because his presence is thrice as strong as the rest of the soldiers. The authority in his voice rings different as well, stronger and more assured than the others.
He kneels to their eye-level casually, but reaches for the knife at his belt. “We can make this as hard or as easy for you as you want. You’ve kind of caught me in a bad mood today, though, so you might have to do a bit of convincing.”
“Convincing?” Kazuha repeats. He falls in step with Beidou’s lead—devil’s advocate while she aims for the throat. “We won’t know how to cooperate unless you tell us what you want.”
“Sure, sure. Guess I should start with that.”
He stands, and on cue one of his guards steps forward and drops a pouch into the man’s outstretched hand. The guard steps away just as quickly and the leader overturns the pouch onto the floor. Their Visions come tumbling free, Beidou’s landing like a skipping stone and Kazuha’s spinning like a coin before falling still. He knows the Visions are sturdy enough to take it, but he can’t help but wince.
“So you want our Visions, great,” Beidou says. He can practically hear her balled fists in her voice. “Now you’ve got ‘em, so why not off with our heads? It’s not like we made it easy for you to drag us onto your ship.”
“Yeah, see, I’ve thought this through.” The man kneels again, pushing Kazuha’s Vision around with a finger. “About gods, about their gifts, about what makes a person ‘worthy’ and if any of it even matters at all. We don’t see many Electro Visions these days, and I’ve heard Anemo is a pain in the ass to control.”
Kazuha keeps his mouth shut about that. His Vision has never responded well to control—not that he’s ever gone out of his way to force it to obey him. Wind should be free. It works with him so long as he maintains his head. But he doesn’t know enough about Electro Visions to be able to speak on them.
“What does that mean?” Beidou questions. “Because I’m not telling you jack shit about my Vision until you explain why you want to know.”
“I don’t need you to tell me anything about your Vision, that’s not why we’re here. What I want to know is if a Vision can be inherited.”
“Inherited?” Kazuha plays devil’s advocate again. “I don’t understand.”
“So.” The man reaches behind Beidou and yanks her up by the chains. She grits her teeth with impressive self-control. “When a Vision user dies, their Vision goes dark, right? Cold, worthless husk—like a corpse. We all know that, don’t we? No need to explain it?”
“You could explain it for shits and giggles,” Beidou says. He yanks on her chains.
“If your Vision is a gift from a god,” he says, “surely they wouldn’t mind if you decided to pass it along to someone you found more worthy than yourself. Is that unreasonable?”
For some reason it reminds him of Tomo, every fruitless effort to rekindle the Electro behind that empty husk of a Vision. It presses into Kazuha’s chest beneath his haori as a cold reminder, just beside his heart.
“That sounds like blasphemy,” Kazuha says carefully. “I don’t think a Vision can be inherited that way.”
“Sorry, but I’m gonna agree with him,” Beidou chimes in, rolling her shoulder. The man doesn’t loosen his grip. She’s hiding it better this time, but her teeth are still gritted. “If it were that simple, scoundrels like you’d be running around all over the place wrecking havoc with Visions. I’m pretty sure the gods knew what they were doing.”
“You sound confident,” the man says. “Well, if that’s true, surely you wouldn’t mind verbally handing off your Vision to me.”
Beidou laughs. “Yeah, sure!” she says, tossing her head back. “Knock yourself out, take it. Just me saying so isn’t gonna be enough.”
At her feet out of reach, the Electro behind her Vision flares in something akin to pride.
The man shrugs. “We’ll see.”
“Is that what this is?” Kazuha questions. “Do you really think the gods would make it that simple for someone to steal and abuse their gift? How could you ever be sure the inheritance was successful?”
The man reaches for his knife with his spare hand. “If the previous owner were to die, it’d be pretty obvious, wouldn’t it?”
“What?”
He slashes the knife across the side of Beidou’s throat.
Deep.
Blood sprays against the side of her face, soaking her collar and shoulder in the amount of time it takes to gasp. Her eyes fly wide and her mouth opens, but no sound escapes. Her Vision spasms.
Kazuha’s heart slingshots into his throat.
“Shit, it didn’t work!”
The man drops her. She lands like a bag of stones, one hand clamping down over the gash. Blood gushing through the cracks between her fingers. He bends down and picks up her shuddering Vision.
Purple, to gray, to purple.
Purple, to gray. Gray. Purple.
“Well, I guess that’s alright. Fine.” The Vision is dropped and lands in a puddle of Beidou’s blood. He picks up Kazuha’s Vision instead. “We’ve still got your Vision, don’t we? Who knows, maybe I’ll be a healer and you won’t have to watch your friend bleed out. Or maybe I’ll slit her throat again.”
Kazuha’s Vision explodes.
The wind turns scorched, Anemo picking up at Kazuha’s feet. The man screams and drops his Vision to claw at his face, and his subordinates snap to attention, reaching for their weapons.
Anemo breaks Kazuha’s chains apart.
Kazuha swings his arm. Broken metal ringlets fly. The guards slam into the hull of the ship with cracks, cries and the clattering of weapons. They hit the wooden floorboards. Kazuha stands.
“Don’t come any clo—!”
Kazuha swipes his hand through the seething wind around him and the monster who hurt her crunches into the ceiling and stays there. Movement catches his eye and Kazuha twists his foot, and the Anemo answers him. That’s all it takes.
A scream, cut off before it becomes anything.
Beidou’s blood. Flickering Vision.
Blood that isn’t Beidou’s.
Instinct.
Red.
The wind cries out around him when his mind empties itself of thoughts and he can’t feel his heart beating.
Kazuha heaves for breath, stood in the middle of the room with his chains dangling from his wrists, the deck a cage of stillness and silence and blood.
He takes one stumbling step backwards, dizzy, and feels wind at his back as it keeps him from toppling over. His knees tremble until he can take a breath.
He runs for Beidou’s side.
She’s alive, if only just, her hands still feebly pressing at the gouge in her neck. Kazuha catches her wrists and pulls them away. Wind rustles through her hair to smooth it away from her face. The wound is deeper than he thought. His knees are already wet and sticky with her blood.
“It’s going to be okay, Beidou, it’s going to be okay,” Kazuha begs, pressing her hands together over her chest. The light in her eyes is fading. She’s not seeing him anymore. “Not again, I can’t— no.”
Kazuha crams his hands over the gash and squeezes his eyes shut, capturing his heartbeat and finding Beidou’s below his fingers, shooting prayer after prayer into the heavens as her blood pours over his knuckles. Anemo caresses over his face and through his hair, its heat mellowed into a gentle warmth. He sobs and presses harder, bowing his head.
“Please,” he says, “please, please—”
The wind flows over his hands, over the blood and over the wound. He hears her take a shaky inhale. He locks his fingers.
“Please—”
The wind trickles away, swishing around them one final time before dispersing, and Kazuha’s eyes snap open. He smears away the blood as best he can and finds the wound knitted shut, nothing more than a long, thin scar across the side of her neck. He checks her breathing, and her chest is rising and falling steadily, too, with just a few hitches. Her Vision is dull, but solid.
Kazuha heaves all the air he’d been holding, all the blood in his head dropping into his feet. His hands tremble and his knees are weak, but this isn’t over. Enemy vessel. Middle of nowhere. Beidou still needs medical attention that he isn’t equipped to give her.
He clips her Vision to her side. Then he finally takes his own from the floor. It shines at him and pulses softly and he presses his lips to it, squeezing his eyes shut against the tight coil of emotion in his chest.
“Thank you,” he gasps.
He clips it around his neck beside Tomo’s, and with no small amount of struggle he gets himself beneath Beidou, draping her over his back with as much strength as he can muster. Taking slow but deliberate steps, he finds his way to the upper deck of the ship, where the air is cool, the night is deep and the hot stench of blood is left behind.
He sets Beidou down near the galver, where he can watch over her, and charts a new course for the ship. He may not be the most experienced sailor, and most of the terminology is still beyond him, but. He’s going to do this.
“I’m going to get us home,” he says to her, wrapping her up in a blanket he found. Unable to hold himself back, he hugs her, just tight enough. “I promise.”
He doesn’t know how much she’s actually hearing, but she squeezes his hands.
Kazuha tarries back and forth between the helm and Beidou’s side, carefully pushing more healing wind into whatever internal injuries stretched below the gash. The wind is one step ahead of him each time, answering his call even before he’s asked anything of it. His hands haven’t stopped shaking and his knees are so weak he can hardly stand, and there’s a migraine buried deep in his skull, but she breathes a little easier each time, and he doesn’t stop.
The Alchor was last stationed at Mondstadt. Where it is now, he doesn’t have a clue—but he knows his and Beidou’s captors hadn’t made it far, and even if the Alchor’s since departed, the church of Barbatos is there and he could get a carrier hawk to the Crux easily enough. Seems like a safe bet navigationally.
Tending to Beidou’s wounds, adjusting the sails, steering the ship where necessary, collapsing against the taffrail each time he inevitably blacks out. Time meanders by like the clouds in the sky.
“Look, over there! Kazuha!”
The Alchor rolls up beside Kazuha’s commandeered ship, Drake and Furong and Juza immediately hopping over. Kazuha gets as far as, “Please, help Beidou—” before his knees buckle and Juza leaps forward to catch him. Drake and Furong rush to Beidou’s side. Huixing and Little Yue, weapons drawn, search the rest of the ship.
He wants to tell Huixing and Little Yue that there’s nothing to find, but his voice isn’t there. Once Drake and Furong have collected Beidou and Little Yue and Huixing have returned, they cross over to the Alchor and leave the damned vessel behind.
The Crux gets them situated below decks, in the quarter they recently repurposed as Suling’s medical ward. Comfortable, in clean clothes no longer soaked in blood. Warm. They’d all urged Kazuha to sleep, sure, but he didn’t listen. After the first couple of times they stopped trying to remind him. He sits at Beidou’s side away from his own bedroll, wrapping his arms around his knees and listening to her breathe.
Furong pokes his head in, his arms full of blankets with a bucket dangling from the crook of his elbow. “You’re still awake?”
“This is my fault,” Kazuha says quietly.
Furong sighs, and sets the bucket down with a loud noise. “We aren’t doing this.”
“What?”
“The blame game.” Furong wraps the blanket around him. “It’s unproductive as hell. Knock it off.”
“I—“
“You were a target, too. Could’ve just as easily been you in her place and I’d be giving her this spiel instead.”
Kazuha doesn’t have a good retort for that. “The crew of the ship, I… are they…?”
Furong pats him on the head, but leaves his hand lingering long after. “The most important thing was gettin’ you and the Captain out of there,” he says. “We sent word to Mondstadt, they’re out searching for it now. It’s out of our hands.”
“Oh.”
Furong pats his head some more. “Don’t dwell on it.”
Kazuha nods, drawing the blanket around himself with a shiver.
“Good. Now will you try to get some sleep, too? Your eye bags have eye bags.”
“I can’t promise. But I’ll try.”
“Good enough.”
Furong leaves him be, taking a stack of firewood with him, and Kazuha fidgets with the hem of Beidou’s blanket. His head is full of air, dizzyingly hot. Even his lungs press too tightly against his chest when he takes in air. His Vision thrums anxiously.
“Sorry,” Kazuha breathes out, realizing how exhausted he is, “but I can’t rest yet.”
The wind fusses with. He tries not to roll his eyes.
“Ugh, what’re you doing up…?”
Kazuha jolts, his attention snapping down to Beidou as she squints up at him. “Beidou,” he gasps. She keeps staring, familiar annoyance deep in her eye and he’s never been happier. “How are you feeling?”
Beidou heaves a heavy groan. “Ugh, I dunno. Hell. What happened? God.” She kneads her temple with a thumb. “My head is killing me.”
Kazuha scoots closer. “You lost a lot of blood. Try not to move around too much, Captain.”
“Captain?” She squints at him. “Am I dead?”
Kazuha blanches. It’s been so long since he’d gotten used to calling her Beidou, he didn’t mean to slip back into formality. “No, I… sorry. I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, flapping a hand in his vague direction. “Nah, you’re fine, kiddo, just feelin’ a little tipsy. A lot tipsy. You said I lost blood? The hell happened?”
“Um.” Kazuha’s legs are asleep beneath him. How long has he been kneeling like this at her side? “We were taken by vagrants, remember?”
“Oh!” Beidou snaps her fingers twice over her head. “Right, right! Now I remember. I think. God.” She pinches the bridge of her nose with the same hand, groaning. “Right, those guys. Those guys. God, those bastards, really thought they were the shit…”
“Beidou?”
She flaps her hand at him again. “I’m fine, I’m fine, kid. Lightheaded, dizzy, you know. You’ve lost blood before. I’ll be fine. What happened after we were taken, then? I remember getting dragged under their ship— nasty lil’ piece of work, a real tool. If they were going for intimidation they would’ve been better off if they’d serenaded us.”
“You’re very talkative, Beidou.”
“You’re usually more talkative.” She frowns at him, and the befuddlement in her gaze scatters. “Hey. Kid, what happened?”
Kazuha digs his fingernails into his knees, and tastes blood in his mouth. He must’ve bit open the inside of his cheek. It hurts, but he doesn’t care. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what? Kid, what’d you do?”
He can exhale, but not inhale. His hands shake. “I couldn’t protect you. I—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Beidou, I’m sorry—”
“Hey, hey. Kid.” She wrestles his hand into hers. “Knock it off. I’m… struggling to put together what happened, but you have a habit of shouldering blame that’s not yours. Not this time.”
“But it’s my fault you were injured,” Kazuha says, suffocating the instinct to pull his hand away, “if I’d been quicker on the draw, or, if I’d caught on sooner or given up the devil’s advocate act, he wouldn’t have been able to hurt you—”
“Do you think you’re always going to be able to protect me?”
“I—what?”
“I asked you a question. Do you think you're always going to be able to protect me?” Beidou’s gaze is serious. “Because if you do, we have a lot to talk about.”
“Of course I can’t always protect you, that’s not what I—”
“Where do you think I’d be as a captain if I blamed myself for every single mishap that befalls my men? Where do you think I’d be as a person?”
“Captain—Beidou, I… that—”
“Taking fault is one thing. Doing stupid shit is one thing. Acknowledging when you’ve made the wrong call and taking responsibility for the repercussions is one thing. But self-assigning blame and guilt is going to tear you apart, Kazuha.”
Kazuha doesn’t know what to say.
They sit in thin silence, pins and needles still shooting up Kazuha’s calves as he trains his gaze away from Beidou. She isn’t wrong, and he knows that; but he doesn’t believe it.
“... Baozhai.”
Kazuha looks up. “Baozhai?”
Beidou doesn’t meet his eyes. “I wasn’t born a pirate. Well,” she snorts, with a wane smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, “not entirely. My old man was a pirate. That influenced the decision, I’m sure. But I’d always wanted to be on the sea, and, well. I wasn’t alone in that.”
Kazuha finally unfolds his legs, leaning forward to listen.
“Her name was Baozhai,” Beidou says. “A friend of mine, we grew up together. Not as kids, but, you know. Teenagers. We were rebels together. When I turned eighteen, my old man gave me a ship. Nothing like the Alcor—glorified fishing ship, if I’ll be real. But I was excited. Baozhai and I’d go sailing together every day from dawn ‘till dusk. We swore we’d do it forever, and when my dad passed away, we started to make that happen. She’d just turned twenty when it happened.”
“What happened?”
“Storm,” Beidou says. “Came out of nowhere. I was lucky enough to get dragged ashore by a dockman at Liyue, but, she… You never forget the first time you let someone down.”
“I’m sorry.”
Beidou nods. “She would’ve liked you,” she says. “Wish you could’ve had the chance to meet her.”
“What was she like?”
“Oh, she was a pain in the ass,” Beidou chuckles, shaking her head. “She’d go on and on about aquatic life and architecture and… what she’d do when she was older, all the places she’d go and the sights she’d see. She was a real good kid. You would’ve liked her.”
“I’m sure I would have,” Kazuha agrees. “The tangents we could have had…”
Beidou laughs, if brokenly, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh my god, you two would’ve been unstoppable. Yeah. Yeah, you would’ve gotten along just fine.” The silence settles for a time, and she drops her hand. “You haven’t told me much about your friend,” she says, gentle, “but I wish I’d had the chance to meet him, too.”
“Tomo,” Kazuha murmurs. “Yes, I… I think he would have liked you as well.”
“You still beat yourself up over him a lot, don’t you?”
“I don’t know how to stop.”
Beidou struggles to sit up, shooing his hands away when he moves in to help her. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she says, but doesn’t take a deep breath until she’s upright. “I won’t give you a hard time about it. Grief sucks. But you do have to think about what it means to keep living.”
“I know.” He wishes he knew better, that he didn’t have to learn. “I feel lost, sometimes,” he admits. “I think. I don’t know how to honor his memory without being consumed by—by how much I miss him.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Kid, nobody does.”
A hush settles over them, long enough for Kazuha to remember how tired he is and how tired she must be.
“Your culture’s pretty big on honor, isn’t it?” Beidou says. “What do you think is the best way to honor his memory? Really.”
Kazuha thinks. “He told me once, that he lived a life of vicarious hope through each step he took forward.”
“Ah, a dreamer.”
“Inazuma needed dreamers. He had enough of them for us all.”
“Have you given any more thought to going back?”
“I was born in Inazuma,” Kazuha says quietly, “but it hasn’t been home in a very long time. The homesickness I feel is stronger when I’m there than when I’m away.”
“I can understand that.” Beidou sighs. “I feel the same way about Liyue sometimes. Often. The Alcor—well, it’s more the crew than the ship. But here’s the only place that feels like home.”
“I think I agree.”
She smiles thinly. “Still sorting that part out?”
He nods.
“Well, that’s fine. But you do remember what I said, about being welcome here for as long as you want it. I’ll always stand by that.”
“I know.” It’s one of the few things he’s sure of in times like these. “Do you… remember what happened on the ship? The one we escaped from?”
“Sorta. It’s coming back.” Beidou presses two fingers to her temple and leans into them. “I don’t remember anything after getting my throat slashed. Must’ve blacked out.”
“I healed you,” Kazuha says. “With my Vision.”
Beidou blinks. “You can do that?”
“I did,” Kazuha says. “I don’t know if that means I’ll be able to do it again.”
“Damn. Okay.” She presses into her fingers harder. “Yeah, I don’t know much about Anemo Visions, and I can’t imagine it’d be comparable to Electro.”
Curious, he asks, “What is Electro like?”
“Ugh, testy.” She didn’t even need time to think about it. “It’s like trying to put adrenaline on a leash, you’ve only got so much control over it before it needs somewhere to go. Herding cats.”
He nods.
“So, what about Anemo? What’s that like, huh?”
“It’s more… mutual.” Just to acknowledge it, the wind around him presses against his hands, files through his fingers, shuffles his hair around. He exhales sharply with a tired smile. “There's little you can do to properly control it; the only thing to it is to listen, and there's little else the wind asks of you than to be heard. It’s been a steady companion to me for as long as I can remember.”
“Poetic. It suits you.”
“Electro suits you just fine as well.”
“Thanks.” Beidou scoots over, lifting the blanket and patting the space beside her. After a brief and unproductive hesitation, Kazuha shimmies under the blanket and presses into her side. She drops her arm around his shoulder. “When’d you get your Vision, kid?”
“It isn’t a very interesting story. Not compared to yours.”
“Damn, which one of them spoiled the surprise?”
“Furong started to.”
“Started to, what happened?”
“Huixing. She tried to strangle him with a pot holder.”
Beidou laughs, and Kazuha is so, so thankful she’s here. “Alright, checks out. How much of the story do you already know?”
“... Most of it.”
“Damn.”
“But I would like to hear it from you regardless.”
“Tough, I asked you first.”
“Hm, well. I’ll share only if you promise to tell me your Vision story afterwards.”
“If I’m awake, we’ll see.”
“Beidou.”
“Alright, alright…” She rests her head against his hair. “But you first.”