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Was it weird that Zhongli kept rubbing up against things like a cat? Only in so far as the answer to, “hey, are you okay?” being, “I am a bit itchy,” could be considered strange and if he’s honest, it is a little strange, so Childe keeps watching.
Normally Zhongli lives a fairly sedentary lifestyle as he works - he will spend hours behind his desk working quietly, and then he will get up and he will go for his walk around the area and then he will come back and he will pass the rest of his night peacefully sipping on his stupid sugar-less tea and reading just as quietly as he worked, and then he will go to sleep and Childe, in all honestly, much as he thinks the man’s a hoot when he says literally anything because there’s only so earnest you can be about dead-head stupidity before you pass into parody but he’s just so honest about it all, thinks he’s a little boring at times like this! He could stand to come out a little more often, he thinks. Maybe walk around some more. Come to the bar with him and read his dusty books there. History is always so much more interesting when it’s spoken of when you’re off your shits, and maybe Childe would be more inclined to listen at times like then.
But since the onset of the dreaded and dastardly Itch has happened, Zhongli has been moving a lot more. He wriggles on his ass like trying to get the heels of his feet to rub back against inflamed skin; he gets up and then just sort of starts squishing himself up against the door frame of his office, to Childe’s absolute bafflement; not just once, even, has Childe walked in to visit and seen Zhongli taking his nails to his chest, his neck, his legs and okay, yes, the answer of "itchy," said through sheepish lips and soft, rounded eyes makes sense, sure, but Childe gets itchy sometimes too and the most he’ll do is scratch absently at it, or pick at the inevitably scab that’s formed around whatever healing wound he has that’s bothering him.
And he takes long-ass baths now, too. That’s the part that really surprises him - Zhongli may have the soul of an eighty-year old man, but he’s as a very principled and focused sort of chap who doesn’t like letting things over-run too much because then he has to think about making up for lost time, and he is nothing if not grumpy and somewhat pouty about having to rush work.
“Uh, hey,” says Childe, in front of the bathroom door. “Zhongli? I’ve been meaning to ask. Is everything, you know. Okay?”
From behind the door comes a violent splashing and crashing noise, and when Zhongli says, “yes, yes, I am fine,” it doesn’t actually come as particularly reassuring because Childe honestly thinks he’s heard him bash his head somewhere, if that ‘ow!’ was anything to go by.
“... Are you sure?” Childe tries again. “I’m just-” he nibbles on his lip, tries to think of the best way to word this. “I just think there’s a lot to be concerned about, here.”
“Nothing to be worried about,” Zhongli assures him, through the sound of more splashing and bashing and slapping (?). “Truly, I am fine. Your tea is getting cold, so I would recommend you return to the breakfast table. I will be out shortly.”
“I know you say that,” Childe continues, and he has the back of his hand hovering just at the door, yet torn between knocking and letting himself in because people always do underestimate the horrors of what itching can reveal your skin to be suffering from. “But itching can be a bunch of really nasty things. Chickenpox, Eczema, Hives, Psoriasis… none are good, at all. If you’re scratching a bunch, maybe you should go to the clinic.”
Some more noises from behind the door happen, before Zhongli’s voice floats out. “Please trust me,” he says. “They sound very concerning, but I am fine. I am well-aware of what is happening, there is nothing to-”
And then Zhongli cuts himself off with a horribly meek, “ ow !” that just sounds so pained and miserable that maybe it’s a bit telling, regarding the reality of what and how Childe feels about him, because the second he hears that his instincts flare to life from the sleepy if confusing morning they’ve been having, and he is not only forced to grapple with the split-second cosmic understanding that evidently if Zhongli were in trouble he’d rush in to help him but also that the bathroom door isn’t locked.
He is let in, freely. Perhaps that would be his indication that this would be one of those cases where it’s up to him, but that there’s no going back if he wanted to. At that point, too, he is forced to acknowledge that maybe when it comes to Zhongli making such sad, horrible noises, he wouldn’t even think of going back.
So leads them to this scenario, that has brought Childe experiencing the last few hours in a condensed flashback-reel is a ‘best ofs’ and all the opposing ley lines that brought them to this moment of singular convergence upon destiny’s line being lit up, telling him where he could have gone and how he could have avoided this situation from ever occurring:
Childe is standing in the open door of the bathroom, his hand suspended in midair and keeping the door from swinging back into his face, much as he sort of thinks that might be a good idea at this point because at least in his unconsciousness his mind might be able to better line things up and figure what the hell he’s looking at without him actually having to be present for it, in the same way they always recommend going to sleep before a big test because your mind does better sorting information out without you being there to fret and freak out.
The bathtub’s tap running at high pressure, and judging by the relative soundlessness of it, it has been for a while and is mostly full. There has been no attempt to turn it off, though, so maybe this is an extreme thirst to quench, because he imagines at this point if you were to lie in the tub, it would overflow horribly onto the floor and Zhongli’s a peaceful, silly old man but old men are never fans of liquids and mess.
Zhongli lies looking weak on the floor, absent of a shirt and rat tail undone and his skin simultaneously looking so red he looks like a person-shaped tomato and also somewhat musty from a strange sheen of his skin so he simply looks like he’s been wrapped in something like cling-film. Lying next to his arm is what looks like a lizard’s shed skin - it’s the same shape and width as his arm, with the minute details of a skin pressed into it as if it was fashioned entirely by some sort of cast around him. Utterly translucent with nothing but those details in somewhat rolled whites from depth of creation, Childe can see the tiles of the bathroom from through it.
Childe’s mouth falls open and he points at it.
“That is a little rude,” Zhongli mumbles. “I do not point and stare at your coarse ginger hairs on the bathroom floors now, do I?”
“Pubes are different from shed skin! Hold on,” Childe blinks. “Why are you even shedding?”
“Lizards tend to, don’t they?”
Childe closes his mouth with the intention of saying some sort of inane protest, before his shoulders slouch and he realises that he is unfortunately correct about this. “Alright,” says Childe, and if his voice sounds far away it’s only because his spirit has gone elsewhere to avoid this realisation, like it has thrown its hands up and packed its bags and said, ‘nope, not today’ and left its body behind. Well, they say Mondstadt has a lovely temperament around this time of year. “Alright! Sure. Okay, fine. Maybe get up off the floor.”
“I cannot,” says Zhongli, very earnestly. “I am very itchy. The coolness helps relieve it until the bath is finished.”
“Yeah, I got that. Moulting can’t be easy on human skin. What’s the bath for?”
“It is a cold water one,” Zhongli tells him. “Always relaxes my skin.”
It isn’t very hygienic for new skin to just lie on the ground, but I guess he’ll worry about that when he gets to it. “Have you tried itching it properly?” he says, maybe a little stupidly.
Zhongli nods, here. “However, my back is not ready. It will damage my skin if I scratch at it and risk pulling the moult off prematurely.”
As he speaks his nails idly itch at the top of his chest. Much as it’s ruby-red, it doesn’t look particularly ready to be torn off - it’s thin but the pale dried skin layer is visible despite the way it is lit up from within from sheer rawness. Actually, he’s almost a bit concerned for the way his skin looks - one of his arms seems entirely finished already, but it’s so pink it looks like a newborn baby’s elongated arm.
Also, Childe’s sort of neglected to mention this bit, but the bathroom is in a completely state of disarray because Zhongli’s legs have, apparently, trailed off into a large snake tail that looks much more as if it’s conventionally moutling, scale patterns and all. The tail is fat and less red so much as it is blood-orange, with large yellow fanning scales running atop it like a running set of topazes, as if being crowned for its very formation. Without even recognising it, the nobility of the tail is awe-inspiring, thick and regal and the tip rest on the downed toilet seat while the rest of it wriggles and writhes throughout the bathroom, various portions of it more ready to moult than the rest of it.
“Forgive me,” Zhongli tells him, and he even manages to almost bow his head like he usually does out of politeness while apologising. “You entered so suddenly and transforming is rather unwieldy during this time due to the irritation. I am not particularly good at doing so at this present moment. I hope it is not off-putting.”
But Childe does recognise it. “That’s,” breathes Childe. “Rex Lapis’s tail.”
“Yes.”
“You’re Rex Lapis.”
“Yes,” says Zhongli, before cocking his head. “... I never really attempted to hide it. It seems awfully blatant to me.”
“Holy shit,” says Childe, and then he says, “Rex Lapis moults,” and then he says, “ you’re fucking Rex Lapis? ”
“I am not ‘fucking’ Rex Lapis,” Zhongli says, again almost infuriatingly earnest and also kind of stupid. “It would be rather difficult to have coitus with myself.”
“I-” says Childe, and at a complete loss of what to do at this moment, weakly asks, “have you tried any lotion?”
Zhongli’s face makes a little ‘oh’ motion. “I have not. It is not usually this itchy though.”
Still feeling like he’s embroiled in the tendrils of the strangest wet dream ever conceived by his mind (if he wakes up recalling this with a hard on he is going to go promptly to therapy, he resolves), Childe asks, “why is it so bad this time?”
“It is always bad whenever I am partially human,” says Zhongli simply. “Perhaps I shall try lotion, though.”
“What? Oh,” says Chide, before remembering what he means. “Yeah, yeah, uh- sure. Sure, you can try some lotion.”
Impressively, when Zhongli asks, “Childe, are you quite alright? You seem a bit stupefied,” he sounds the same of worried as a loving pet mother might in regards to her sad whimpering little pup, even though Zhongli is the whimpering pet here and Childe is the person who is the human, which really just goes to show how utterly unflappable Zhongli is.
“I’m fine! Yeah,” says Childe quickly, and trying not to get distracted by the way Zhongli’s fat tail has started flapping like the curious tail tip of a cat. “Just, you know. Thinking about the best lotion to get for you. Can I just-”
His tail is so big it practically coats the entirety of the room like a fat, meaty, wiggly carpet, Zhongli himself somewhere in the middle of the coil blinking up at him. Childe has to step over it and do his absolute best to not trip over it and then fall flat on the rest of his tail and he manages it, sort of, even though he’s stuck half doing the splits to actually get to the medicine cabinet for the lotion. The sheer amount of Zhongli there is means it’s difficult to find much space that is unoccupied, but Childe makes do, sort of, hopping from one space he can fit his foot into to the other until eventually he gets to lean over and basically find his way through the medicine cabinet through touch of the bottles alone.
“I apologise for not offering to transform back,” Zhongli mumbles, watching and doing his best to accommodate and make little spaces for him to get through anyway. “If I do that, I will not be wearing pants.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Childe says. “It’s not, uh, a big deal. Not my first time splitting my legs to get what I want. Long as you’re comfortable.”
He fumbles around some more until eventually his hands land on a thin bottle of something and he thinks, either it’s toothpaste or it’s lotion and even if it’s toothpaste you can do some very helpful things with burning skin and toothpaste, so he pulls it out.
“Can you get up?” he asks Zhongli as he painstakingly turns on his heels and tries not to step on his tail some more.
Zhongli merely looks up at him. “I could, but the bath is not finished yet.
“Lotion.” Zhongli still doesn’t seem to get it, so patiently Childe continues. “I’m going to put it on you.”
“Oh!” says Zhongli, before frowning. “Oh, no. You do not need to do that. I can manage just fine.”
“Sure, but-”
“I appreciate it,” Zhongli says on a gentle smile. “But I have been handling this for many thousands of years. It has not been impossible for me previously, and it shall not be this time, either. Your concern is unfounded.”
“Oh,” says Childe, dropping the lotion to his side. “Right. Sure. Hey, whatever you say. You’re the overgrown lizard, here.”
Zhongli nods peacefully at him again, before wriggling his back. “So, if you do not mind,” he continues. “I would like to take my very cold bath.”
He is very much so wearing out the word ‘sure’ at the moment as though he’s looking to remove it entirely from sure over-exposure from popular lexicon, but he simply has nothing else to say, so Childe yet again goes, “sure,” before stepping out of the various rings his big-ass tail has made across the bathroom floor. It’s a bit like he’s playing hopscotch, and it’s accordingly just as silly to feel as though he’s doing.
But Childe pauses, right at the door, and instead of putting the lotion down as he leaves he decides to take it with him. “Just in case,” he tells the watch Zhongli.
“Alright,” says Zhongli, smiling at him. “Just in case.”
When he shuts the door behind him again, there’s a loud splashing noise that sounds like a cannonball dropped into a pool, and the hammering of his heart in his ear.
“Is it that strange?” Zhongli muses, when he’s all dry and behind his desk and still, continually, itching at himself despite now having a shirt on and no longer being particularly lizard-y. “I have never thought it was.”
Childe hums, playing with his cup of tea rather than drinking it. “I guess regular ol’ humans like us don’t think it’s weird that we have really long childhoods in comparison to other mammals. It’s not too weird when you think of it like that.”
“Hm,” Zhongli says.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. A pause for Zhongli to pick up his pen, and then he puts it down again, before the scratch scratch scratching at his wrist and over his knuckles to begin again.
“Oh my God,” Childe says. It’s as annoying as the incessant ticking of a clock reminding you that seconds are ever-passing, he should think. “This is driving me insane. I have no idea how you’re dealing with this.”
Zhongli looks like he doesn’t know what the issue is, which is all sort of annoyingly endearing, with his raised brows and thin lips and soft eyes, even as he keeps going to fucking town on his wrist. “I have for many years,” Zhongli says.
“Yeah, you said that. You haven’t come up with anything better besides ‘rubbing against doors’ and ‘taking cold baths’?” Childe frowns. “You’ve had years to handle it and that’s the best you have?”
“I must say,” Zhongli tells him. “You are handling this realisation rather well, all things considered.”
“I just think it hasn’t really hit me yet,” Childe admits, before he continues on to saying, “so, what? In the Olde Days, were there rituals or something that people helped you moult with?”
Zhongli lifts his gaze to the ceiling as he thinks back. “None that I can recall,” he says eventually. “But I do remember after I moulted, I would gift my shed skin as a sign of goodwill and faith.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shakes his head. “Nowadays I just eat it, though.”
“ Eat ?” Childe almost gags in horror.
“It is full of proteins,” Zhongli explains. He seems to be enjoying himself strangely, a bizarre peacefulness coming over his features. “Calcium and other nutrients. It must be strong, naturally, to protect my skin normally.”
“That’s disgusting, man!”
“It tastes mostly of chicken, actually,” Zhongli muses. “I could substitute it in a meal. You might come to enjoy it.”
The worst thing is Childe knows he isn’t saying this just to fuck with him. He is genuinely just being so nice about his shed skin that it’s turning into sheer gross-out. “I think I’m good!” he says quickly, before Zhongli gets any ideas about a Shed Skin Coconut Curry or something equally cursed.
“I see.” He sounds sad? This is ridiculous. What the fuck? “Well, I am a few days into my moulting. I will be fine within another few, and then it will be over for another year.”
He says that almost like he’s anticipating it. Childe thinks on this. “You enjoy it?”
“Not particularly,” Zhongli says. “It is a very uncomfortable experience. But the seasons can all blend into one, when you have lived as long as I. The body, however, is impossible to miss. It is a nice reminder that time passes.”
It’s spring right now, pink blossoms bright outside and the wind cool but not cold, warm but not hot. Zhongli looks outside his window, his head turning and itching lightly at himself, his expression distant but not sadly so.
“Another year,” he mumbles to himself. “Three-hundred and sixty-five more rising and falling of the sun.”
Childe watches him, and thinks he’d much like to help him scratch his itch.
“Sounds like it’s one of those contemplative moments,” Childe says, as just outside a pink blossom is torn off its branch and flutters through the sky, to land somewhere on Liyue’s bustling streets and stepped on by a collection of children playing. “Kind of like how I get when it’s my birthday. So? How’s your year been?”
Zhongli shuts his eyes. The corner of his lips are tipped upwards. “It has been good. But I rarely have bad ones. I merely have ones that stand-out in particular.”
“This one count?”
He nods, and then when he looks back at Childe it feels a lot as if he’s watching the transient blossom of a pretty spring flower. “Yes,” he says with a smile. “One I shall recall for a long time, I think. It has been a lovely year.”
“Liyue really is nice,” Childe says. “Snezhnaya is constantly freezing. It’s summers are only somewhat brighter, not any warmer.”
“I think you’re blessed, in a way,” Zhongli says, before sipping idly at his tea. “You have gotten to experience Liyue temperament for the first time. I sometimes get upset I will never get to again.”
Waving his hand, Childe says, “you could try living in Snezhnaya and experience it’s temperament for the first time.”
“I imagine I’ll come running back to Liyue immediately.”
“Ugh, you will! It’s miserable over there, you know,” Childe grouses. “And the people are like its weather, too. Cold and constantly pissed off. Awful, awful place.”
Zhongli lowers his mug, his lips in a languid smile, much like the kind you’d get from a lazy lover after a night spent in each other’s arms. It sets Childe’s guts a-rolling, in something that might be affection but might also be paranoia, if he thinks any longer on it. “The only person from Snezhnaya I know is not cold at all.”
Childe tilts his head up, resting it along the ridges of his knuckles. He meets Zhongli’s smile with a smirk. “You think? Actually, the person from Liyue I know is exactly what I’d expect from a place like here.”
He tilts his head. Behind him, his tail sways, the large fin-like scales decorating atop its length waving gently like the wind is running its fingers through them. “What are they like, then?”
“They are,” says Childe. “Nice. And I get the feeling they’re happy so long as they get to drink their cup of tea at the end of the day and go to sleep before midnight.”
“It is true,” Zhongli muses. “It feels as though time simply does not pass in Liyue, sometimes.”
Childe snorts. “Well, may the next year be a blast too.”
“Many happy returns,” says Zhongli, on a light huff of a laugh, and it sounds like the rustling of tree leaves through a raucous wind.
Zhongli gives up within the hour with keeping a full human transformation, and instead engulfs his office with his tail after ordering no one enter without his express permission so he has a chance to change back before anyone sees him.
“It is simply,” he’s saying as Childe watches in wander, his waist down elongating quickly and more, and more and more like he’s becoming the longest string of spaghetti, his skin transmogrifying from smooth and pale (well, relatively) to scaley and that blood-orange before his very eyes with the sort of ease he thinks you’d get from holding in a shit for so long that it just sort of slips out when you finally stop unclenching. “So uncomfortable, so itchy, I need to air my scales out briefly. Apologies.”
“Can I touch it?” Childe asks instead, like a kid in a candy shop.
He gets a yes, because Zhongli is an angel in a dragon’s body (fucking, apparently ) and when he runs his fingers over his scales carefully so as not to disturb the moulting process that his tail has yet to begin in earnest, he’s surprised to find it’s mostly snake-like and sort of boring with that in mind. The scales are dry - even more dry than normal, Zhongli ensures to tell him with a pout, what with the layer of dead skin across it - and smooth, but bringing a finger down a large portion of it has his fingers bump and run against the ridges and rims of his scales. It’s warm, like he’s touching feverish skin, and he can feel the faint beating of Zhongli’s heart through it, somehow, though that’s a lot like how a sick person’s skin always seems to be jumping with some sort of internal motion startling it.
… Well, actually, it’s a little lame, all things considered, and Zhongli gets disappointed it’s not as exciting as Childe would have hoped, but then he says, “alright, how about this?” and then his face becomes very long like the snout of a snake, his neck explodes into the fluffy mane you’d expect to see on a lion, and his arms take on the same scaly form as the rest of his noodle body, tipped with large claws and his elbows extending into almost-fins, yellow and similar to the standing up scales that line his the over-side of his tail.
“No fuckin’ way,” Childe breathes, and only retrospectively will he realise how impressive it is that Rex Lapis could even fit in Zhongli’s office.
He lifts his hands to touch Zhongli’s snake snoot, and in response to the wondrous, near-euphoric patting with glittering in Childe's eyes, Zhongli purrs.
This is not an exaggeration, nor is it Childe actively looking to make it cuter than it really is by likening it to a much cuter animal that you’d be more likely to have prowling around your house as a pet. It starts off as a strange rumbling that he blinks at, casts his gaze around thinking there’s a dog in the room somehow, only for him to realise it’s coming from in front of him, specifically from where he’d imagine Zhongli’s transformed chest is, and his snake-y eyes have fallen shut and he’s really enjoying being pet like he’s a kitten.
“You’re,” Childe says, in almost awe of it. “Not particularly threatening a God, are you?”
He simply purrs some more, rubbing his snoot fondly into Childe’s palm.
And then Childe looks down, and notices he’s gone back to rubbing the itching away. His tail is shifting, scratching against the smooth flooring desperately, and his own claws are still working at him, this time having moved from his knuckles to now across his much-more fleshy chest. His claws are so sharp, for a brief second, Childe wonders if he could puncture himself if he doesn’t pay any attention.
Childe takes a deep breath, and then carefully says, “seriously. Let me help you out. I know you said you got it, but...”
He doesn’t have anything else to say after that. He doesn’t have a ‘but’ or a reason why he wants to help, besides simply wishing to because Zhongli is…
Zhongli is. Many things, he is. A friend. Rex Lapis. A God. A target. A soft man, who smiles everytime he sees him. A man who can shed his skin and still be exactly the same underneath, because Zhongli is honest and pleasant and lovely, in every aspect of the word.
He must have not changed for years upon years, like a precious jewel waiting to be found in the thick oppression of the dirt, or maybe more like a towering tree that will sit forevermore as long as it is left untouched and always offering shade with his outstretched hands.
Childe is.-
Zhongli’s eyes open up. They’re little black beads like this, but somehow all the same Childe knows what he’s saying just as well as had he been in his human form and looking at him through them, replying with them. With great care, Childe reaches over the desk where he’s left the lotion in plain sight like it was always there to be used if Zhongli simply asked, and as he rumbles happily when Childe pops the bottle open and squirt it onto his palm.
It’s faintly cucumber scented, he thinks inanely, before rubbing it between his fingers. “Wait, will human lotion even work for humans?” Childe says suddenly, looking at his hands and then Zhongli’s dragon scales. “I don’t know. Shall I try anyway?”
Zhongli rumbles again, his head distinctly nodding, which is sort of impressive considering the sheer volume of the fuzz around his neck.
If he’s willing to try Childe isn’t about to deny him the opportunity - he already has it all over him, after all, it would just be the medicinal equivalent of a cock tease if he just got up and washed it off now and backed out - so instead, he tries a little experimental amount on his hands. One is fine, having moulted off early, but the other looks dry enough to be reading to come off, and when he reaches for it to try he keeps his eyes on Zhongli’s face to make sure there’s nothing amiss as he works.
But as he does - wrapping his fingers around each one of Zhongli’s thick claws, down his dragon wrist, below to his below, he merely begins purring anew, and his eyes fall shut again. If he were a human, he’d be humming in delight, the tip of his tail idly twisting back and forth as if he’s wagging it from the sensation.
Childe spends extra time on his knuckles, knowing they’re particularly irritated. He then moves to his chest because it’s right there, and carefully wipes the entirety of his face down, too. He has whiskers that when he inspects are almost entirely wire-like despite their sheer breadth of size, and the large scales of his elbows apparently need no such care, because they’re more akin to the fur around his neck, so there’s no reason to work on those and instead he returns to sweeping his slick hands across the top of his hand, down his arms, though Zhongli huffs somewhat when he moves to below his tail.
“Any better?” Childe asks him, and is surprised to find his voice has gone soft and quiet.
Zhongli nods again, before pushing his head further into his hands. He sighs and it comes out a veritable hurricane, from his dragon nostrils, blustering in Childe’s face and disturbing his hair. It smells like the tea they had for breakfast today - green tea, bitter and fresh, almost floral as if there is an entire garden in his chest cavity.
“Good to hear,” he mumbles, and doesn’t realise he’s smiling.
The next morning. Childe drops the cup of tea he’s holding, sort of disturbing their otherwise peaceful tea time.
“You’re Rex fucking Lapis!? ”
And it’s a little warm, during the nights, to go to sleep in the same room as a whole-ass moulting dragon, but spring nights in Liyue are fairly nippy anyway and there is a certain comfort, Childe thinks, that comes with sleeping at the very epicentre of a warm dragon who wiggles just often enough for it to not get uncomfortable and is constantly alive.
It’s nice. The trees rustle outside and with his window open throughout the night, Zhongli wakes up a mess of pink petal leaves that have landed on him within the night and Childe laughs as he has to lean over and pluck one out of the very tip of his hair.
The lotion was a great idea, Zhongli says, a few days later. It’s managed to reduce his overall itching needs, both from the coolness and it generally working, and he gets to stay in his human form a little more often.
“This is a good thing,” he makes sure Childe knows for certain, even though it’s not like he was going to argue with him about it. “It would be rude if I stayed in my dragon form when you are not a dragon. I would not wish to be rude.”
“Actually, I think the whole dragon thing is cool as shit,” Childe makes sure he knows in return, if they really must be exchanging things that he mentally classes as ‘a given’, and Zhongli looks taken aback briefly before his gaze softens and he looks at him as though Childe is a husband having just surprised his wife with a large bouquet of red roses, even though it wasn’t their anniversary or her birthday or anything of the sort.
The warm bath sounds like it was a fantastic idea, Childe getting to hear him sing in sheer relaxation, once the lotion has dried into his skin. He has a nice voice - strangely nostalgic, eons old and like the eternal sunlight of that boundary between spring and summer, and in a deep baritone, it is exactly what you would expect from Zhongli in that if he were to be dueting with someone, he’d be the baseline.
“Your back looks ready now,” Childe muses, some of it already coming off. “Shall I start scratching at it?”
He is currently human up top, dragon down below. It appears to be his favoured combination, with the ability to pick things up being something he doesn’t wish to live without. Right now, he’s holding a loofa, and dabbing at his face with the intent of making it a little more humid so the shed comes off easier. “I can do it, if you find it an unappealing task.”
“Nah,” says Childe. “Okay, let me know if it hurts.”
Zhongli nods. Childe finds part of his shed that he can sort of grab ahold of and does so, before beginning the process of gently helping peel him out of it.
The skin underneath is a sharp, angry red, incredibly reminiscent of a newborn’s brand-new skin. While his moult seems fluid, and present both in his human form and his dragon form, there are no scales printing in the thin layer of dead skin as he pulls it off his human back. “Good thing I kept the bath just warm,” Childe says. “So? What are you planning on doing with this moult? I’m not eating it before you say anything.”
There’s the distinct air of Zhongli having to abort what he was going to say last second with how strangely he pauses, so Childe thinks it’s a good thing he reminded him quickly. “I could eat it myself, I suppose.”
Childe makes a mock-retching face. “... Can’t you gift it to people like you usually did?”
“I do not have anyone to gift it to, unless you would like it.”
Childe opens his mouth and then shuts it in surprise, before it falls open perhaps in shock. “Me?”
“I am told it has healing properties,” Zhongli says casually. “Shed skin, at least. When you get in ill back in Snezhnaya, perhaps you can use bits of it in your teas.”
“That’s just drinking it!” Childe tells him sourly. “I’m also not a fan of the idea of drinking your shed.”
Zhongli is audibly pouting when he says, “then you may simply hang it up. The patterns are lovely.”
He’s not wrong. They’re ornate, as if lovingly hand-crafted by a master of craftwork who had spent months on a single piece of the patch he is now to stare at to painstakingly create the rest of the quilt across the next year. But still, it feels a little morbid to hang up his shed, as if he was a taxidermy, so Childe just sort of deflects and hoping it doesn’t sound so ruthless says, “uh, sure. I’ll think about it.”
Zhongli splashes around some more, clearly enjoying the humidity. It’s far too hot for Childe, but he’s not the one moulting and apparently quickly discovering a man can die from the sheer annoying sense of needing to itch something unscratchable, so he’ll deal.
“I wanted to thank you,” Zhongli says. “I have never had any help during my moulting. It is much easier with four hands.”
“Don’t mention it,” Childe tells him. “It’s what friends are for.”
Zhongli fails to respond there, awkwardly and throwing the whole thing off balance.
And Childe is not a particularly un- awkward sort of person, but he still takes responsibility for being the one who unknowingly brought this hell upon their shoulders. “Um,” he adds hastily. “I- sorry, if you didn’t think we were friends or anything, then-”
“No,” says Zhongli, cutting in. He turns his head to the side so Childe can see the round of his cheek like this, and as how he strains to make eye-contact with him. “No, it is not that. It is just…”
He trails off. When he eventually says, “it has simply been a long time since I called anyone that,” it sounds thousands of years away, beneath the same tree he has come to visit yearly, because people will come and they will go and they will die but a tree year after year will lose its leaves only to get them again when spring comes, and spring always was when his heart ached the most.
Childe says, “yeah, same,” and while the flush of Zhongli’s cheek can be explained away by the horrible redness his new skin has, Childe’s cannot be reasoned away so simply.
He tries a little nibble of the shed skin, because curiosity killed the Childe or however the saying goes, and promptly doubles over and gags into the toilet, to Zhongli’s disappointment.
Frustrated by his other arm still not being ready to moult despite being so dry it crackles and creaks whenever he moves his arm, Zhongli attempts to force the process along by slithering into the bathroom, getting some damp toilet paper and rubbing it into the shed.
All he achieves is getting toilet paper in between the shed and his skin, it flaking terribly and looking rather like really bad wet clumps of dandruff, only for his arms.
He learns nothing, and next picks up a rock before Childe intervenes with a start, leaping up from where he sits watching in mild impressiveness at his resourcefulness, and then some level of shown-up embarrassment that he thought it was ever going to be the useful sort of resourcefulness.
Yet more few days later, Zhongli manages to moult just fine out of his tail and body shed without any help from Childe, though he does break a door and almost snaps a poor tree in half in his efforts to rub and pull himself out of his shed like a foot rolling out of a sock.
It wasn’t as though Childe was expecting anything dangerous from this (not that he was even conceiving along the lines of property damage, but it isn’t as though Zhongli’s injured himself almost breaking a tree or knocking the bathroom door off its hinges). It was more interesting than anything. There were no stakes involved, no risk of death. All that was at hand was that Zhongli itched a bit too much and was a little too uncomfortable, frowning, and Childe didn’t like that he was hurting his back by lying on the floor instead of just letting Childe put some cream on him.
But that arm! It’s the bastard arm that does not give up. Poor Zhongli is wandering around almost fully moulted and various different gradients of red from his head to his toe but his arm remains as if wrapped tightly with cling-film and that strange translucent layer of dead skin stretching across his arm.
“Maybe we should go see the vet,” Childe tells him. “Something seems to have gone wrong, right? And all the dried toilet paper can’t be helping.”
“It is natural,” Zhongli insists, sipping at his tea. You’d be forgiven for thinking he was the picture of grace and serenity here, like a cat napping in sunlight and his belly thusly out as his paws splay everywhere, but actually, his brows are curled, and he is visibly annoyed even though it doesn’t make it into his voice. “Entirely so. Wholly, actually. Not all lizards are made equally.”
“Which is why we help those that need it,” Childe tries, but when Zhongli simply brings his drink to his lips again, he knows he’s not winning this. Zhongli might be a little air-headed and more than a bit forgetful, but he’s also frightfully stubborn, like the best sort of guileless pigeon that wanders around the alleyway when there’s an armed robbery at knife point occurring at the other end.
Childe sips at his drink too. Puts it to the side, because he can only handle so much bitterness at one time. “How about a doctor?”
“A doctor would be worse,” Zhongli frowns. “At least I can presume a vet would know what he is doing.”
Childe snorts, shuffling around the table. “Fine. Let me help, then. I’ll pull the last of it off. Gently, obviously,” he adds on quickly, as Zhongli’s face flashes with the same sort of horror a dog might have in his eyes when he realises that they are indeed not going to the park.
“Oh,” says Zhongli, reassured. “That’s kind of you.”
“No more so than what I’ve been doing all week,” Childe says as he reaches for his arm. Zhongli gives it to him, shifts to his side so Childe can better work at him, and it feels more like a prince offering his hand to his charge than Childe is willing to admit lest he begin bringing his lips to his feet too.
As he does, Childe is left to contemplate on the wicked slimness of Zhongli’s fingers. They are artisan, picture-pretty - if you were to ask a person to pose with a set of flowers, a bouquet in their arms, they would select someone like Zhongli, who’s very body looks prime to have been borne amidst them like he belonged on the tablecloth with the two roses. Carefully, he slips his nails under the part he sees flaking lightly, and with his other hand begins to rub at it with the trusty loofa they’ve begun using in place of things like door frames or bookcases.
“At least you’re not itching anymore,” Childe mutters. “Rubbing yourself on things like a dog in heat.”
“It was either that or my nails,” Zhongli says very seriously. “And I do not wish to damage my skin.”
“Yeah, ‘cuz risking splintered wood is safer than perfect nails.” Honestly, it’s a miracle the guy’s skin is as unmarred as it is, if this is how he’s handled his moulting in the past.
He works quietly, comfortably. His fingers are annoying from sheer lack of size, but Zhongli is patient and obedient and listens when he asks him to turn his hand over and apologises if Childe warns him he’s moving his hand too much. The clock ticks steadily from the corner of the room, in much the same rhythm Zhongli had itched in and as he works, Zhongli tells him the story of the time Liyue’s pink blossoms had bloomed purple once and only once, and it’s terribly dreary and dull but every time Childe looks up his eyes are sparkling and his lips are curled, so he finds it impossible to ask him to stop.
On the wind, as missable as a single leaf: “Perhaps there was,” Zhongli mumbles.
But Childe does not miss it. He would not miss a star in the sky if he cared for it. “Pardon?” he asks.
“A ritual,” Zhongli tells him. “Something they did to help me moult. I… admit, I cannot recall it.”
“You’ve lived for a long, long time, right?” Childe murmurs to him, as he runs his finger down his chest. Not lustfully, nothing of the sort - it would be difficult, he thinks, for anyone to find it lustful to apply cream on shedding skin. “It makes sense your memory would fail eventually. There’s so much to remember in just one year, let alone hundreds of thousands.”
Zhongli stays quiet briefly. When he speaks next, it sounds like the plucking of a petal. “Will I remember you, come millennia?”
Childe freezes still. He looks up to find Zhongli staring down wistfully at him, watching every second pass being the coming end, and all that is beautiful and loved will not last - not flowers, not season, and not people, either.
“I fear it,” says Zhongli quietly. “Another year. Perhaps the next, I will forget more I once cherished.”
“Then it wasn’t important anymore,” Childe murmurs. “You can’t punish yourself for maybe forgetting something you care about now later.”
Besides, Childe thinks to himself. Maybe I’ll do something, and you’ll want to forget me because of it. Maybe you will never be able to, and you will look this way because of it.
“You are wrong,” Zhongli tells him. “Everything is important. Everyone is. I wish to remember it all, no matter what they do.”
Childe pauses. “Why’s that?” he asks, going back to attempting to get his nails under a piece of particularly stubborn skin.
“You cannot have the good without the bad,” Zhongli says. “And everyone is somewhat good, with their somewhat bads.”
“What century’d you learn that?” Childe asks, maybe a little cruelly.
“This one,” Zhongli tell him, and when their eyes meet, Childe realises he has known him, perhaps since the moment they met.
Childe has his hand in his. He takes a deep breath, and smells the both green tea set aside on the table and the cucumber-tint to the lotion Zhongli no longer does without.
His cheeks are red, but his face moulted three days ago, and took to having its normal colouration last night.
“What’s your somewhat bad, then?” Childe asks, maybe a little desperately. “It’s like you don’t have one.”
“I am undying,” Zhongli says. “I think that is a somewhat bad. I will moult again next year, and again in three years time, and again in a millennia, though I will lack the hands to help me by then.”
“Stop saying that,” Childe hisses. “Why’re you so convinced I’m planning on leaving?”
“I am undying,” Zhongli says. “And it is my somewhat bad, because you are not.”
Childe fails to respond. He merely holds his hand, and briefly wishes he could break it.
Zhongli clears his throat before long passes. “Forgive me,” he mumbles. “This time of the year always sees me melancholic and contemplative.”
Spring is when the new things grow. In the midst of flowers blooming, snow melting, grass growing, you leave the old things behind. There are so many corpses that Zhongli has said goodbye to that are nothing more, now, than the dirt over which he walks.
Childe doesn’t even have a spring to walk into. He is perpetually winter, large cobalt skies clouded over overhead and condensation puffing from between his lips. Zhongli gets to shed it all yearly. Childe is marked with it, right to his bones.
Every individual finger in his hand slowly parts with the shed as Childe lightly scratches it off. He thinks about drawing blood but only stops, because.
Childe had been okay with the way time never really passed for him, because it wasn’t as though he was going to see any sort of change. Spring comes, and he is a lethal Harbinger, and then summer comes and he is a lethal Harbinger, and then autumn comes and either he is still a walking weapon or he is dead and snapped in half, because he melted in the heat and only just released when he grew cold again and suddenly couldn’t stand it, shivering and going blue in the cheeks.
His finger is red, redder, going briefly white when Childe presses his fingernails into it. Zhongli makes a little noise, but makes no attempt to push him off, even though it must be blatant that his nails are knives that are close to dulling.
“You are,” Zhongli breathes on one of his strange, wonderful reptilian purrs. “So very warm,” and Childe feels his heart go numb, swallows.
Only because you are , he thinks.
Only because I am stealing this warmth from you, he reminds himself.
Another bit of his shed falls off, Childe able to cleanly pull it off him. This part has moulted well, the back of his finger red but not raw with anger.
“I lied, actually,” Childe says. “About Snezhnaya.”
“Really?” Zhongli does not sound surprised.
“Yeah. It’s cold, and the people are miserable,” Childe mumbles. “But it itself isn’t. It’s gorgeous, actually. Quiet. Since it’s always snowing or raining, you’ve always got an excuse to walk with the people you want to be close to.”
His fingers work at Zhongli’s third finger. This time his lips tingle, and his cheeks are perhaps equally red to him.
“You’d like it,” he tells Zhongli. “You could visit one day. It’s just a shit hole if you stop to talk to anyone, but the night sky is really pretty. You’d fit right under it.”
Of all the reactions he was anticipating, laughter was not one. Zhongli begins with a snort, and then he laughs from the chest, and then his elbow is on his desk and his face is buried into his palm, laughing into it.
“I have,” Zhongli says quietly, when he has composed himself. “Another somewhat bad. I find myself constantly returning to the same mistakes despite my age - find myself constantly falling in love with certain humans, and then mourning them forevermore.”
He has one finger left. One finger, and then time stops again, and he slips into it, unforgettable and eternal in the stream of what-were’s and what-could be’s and burning himself into Zhongli’s eyelids to be seen until the end of time every time he blinks, seared into his skin. And what wounds does time heal, anyway? He could tear this finger off whole, and make it never end. A constant reminder, a ‘do not forget this’ bookmark on this single moment, when Childe is kneeling to him and he is surrounded by the remnants of the only moult he will ever think to recall idly when he is lying in bed and his thoughts are wandering.
It is a lovely spring evening. The petals fall, and bugs chirp, and as if it is some sort of punctuation to a sentence they have left hanging, Childe thinks about kissing him. His lips are new, soft and warm, vermilion red like the perennial blossom of a bed of poppies, stretching into the spring-lit sunrise.
When the time comes, he wonders which Childe he will remember, his body in the ground and his soul in his heart. You see, once upon a time, there was a man who thought he was clever, and man who he thought was stupid, and...
“Are the people of Liyue so quick to love?” Childe mumbles, looking up at those glinting eyes of his and wondering what blooms in them, too. “Or is it just you?”
Zhongli just laughs, a soft, small noise that sounds like the twinkling of stars in that wild night sky overhead, and maybe it’s fitting a God would blend into the elements like his warm skin was the sun of spring and his breathy laugh the clouds that sit in the sky. And maybe time doesn’t feel like it’s passing, but the sun will never wait for your languor. Snezhnaya will never wait for your love.
“On the contrary,” Zhongli tells him, just as quiet. His brows are curled, and he looks a lot like he is already looking at a grave. “It feels as though I have been feeling like this for a quite a while.”
“Doesn’t mean much if you give your heart freely, I should think,” Childe says.
“Who says I gave it feely?” Zhongli replies. “Perhaps you took it from me, without my consent.”
“Take it back, then,” Childe murmurs. “Unless you think it really is worth it so long as you can just have your cup of tea this evening.”
“Why, Childe,” Zhongli says, though there is a slight sardonic gleam to the edge of his voice. The corner of Childe’s lips raise in response. “I suspect I’ve no room in my chest for two.”
A God and a human. A reptile and a mammal. A God and a thief. They make such a lopsided pair, but it’s almost endearing, and perhaps that’s the problem, their somewhat bad in a hurricane of overwhelming good. That it is good, but that’s why it’s bad, or maybe he’s just being teenage-cute about this and pretending the light idling on Zhongli’s face is anything but sublime.
So he says, “next time it’s my birthday, we can do this again,” and when Zhongli raises his brows in a strange quiet prevarication of annoying proportions, because Childe is starting to get a little annoyed he has to keep talking about this, he continues on to say, “get all thoughtful and weird. Although I guess it’s been, what, millennia for you? You probably don’t have anything else to think about.”
Zhongli hums. “I have things to contemplate on. The warmth of your cheeks, for one thing.”
And he consciously avoids this, because he doesn’t like that it’s finally been pointed out even though Zhongli isn't teasing and is just being his annoyingly precious, precocious self, so instead of acknowledging it Childe just blurts, “is that why you keep forgetting your wallet? You’ve just stopped thinking, ‘cuz it’s been such a long time?”
Zhongli pouts at that. But he holds him tight, and when Childe pulls the rest of his moult off he presses his nails into his willing skin wondering if this will stay or if time will steal this too, and does not let the wind take him. Not yet.
Perhaps more morbidly than anything, Zhongli buries his moult in his garden, right under the big tree that has been spitting its pink petals at them all week.
“For the bugs,” Zhongli tells him as he turns around and sees Childe watching him with an air of almost curious disgust. “And the other chitinous creatures that wander around here. They may grow big and strong, now.”
Childe frowns at him, dropping his gaze to where the moult now rings the tree in the dirt in concentric circles, much like he recalls their sleeping arrangements as Zhongli had been unable to stay in his human form lest Childe be kept up by the perpetual sounds of scratch scratch scratching. “It feels like we’ve just buried a pet goldfish.”
“I am not dead,” Zhongli reminds him, before gesturing lightly to himself. “The opposite, in fact, unless you tell me you mourn whenever you exfoliate.”
“Well, I mean,” Childe mumbles as he walks past, to return to his office where the green tea grows cold and the ink dries. “I guess I feel sorry for them. They got pushed out of being used on my skin. It’s like a playground bully or something.”
“No,” says Zhongli. He says, “it is just natural that you will eventually die and must be replaced, surely,” and it sounds resigned and tired, before he moves on to telling him the story of the time he observed a poor snake accidentally strangle itself trying to get out of its shed.
In Zhongli’s new skin, the light of the early morning looks trapped, him lighting up with it from within. A gorgeous, eternal spring, and soon it will be summer and soon it will be autumn and finally, winter, and only when he moults yet again and muse that he does not recall what they talked over tea and biscuits during one of Zhongli’s work breaks he will realise, so another year has passed .
The moult only lasts approximately three months before it has been nibbled at by the various beings that claim it. The garden grows so delightfully big that summer.
-The axe, then, isn’t he?