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Five years before the world ended.
Dainsleif is a serious guy.
He needs to be — it’s a must-have quality for a Commander. He smiles at children that look up to him, doesn’t leave bars with women who want to. His schedule is so tight that some say it wears a corset, or at least his friends do. He takes his job with the pride of a boy who grew up watching the soldiers march, a boy who now leads them.
Dainsleif runs a tight schedule.
That is, until his watch breaks, and disorder comes soon after.
He complains in the bunks for twenty minutes that night about the chaos his time regulates until one of his friends recommends an old friend, a clocksmith in the heart of the city.
( “Get a digital one while you’re there. That thing’s ancient.”
“People are allowed to like old things, Halfdan.”
“Not things that break like that one.” )
Dainsleif visits you the next day, setting the metal watch on your counter with his arms crossed. His brows tug together and his expression is more wary than it is expectant.
“Can you fix it?” he asks.
You look it over, rubbing your thumb over rust. “Who’s it from?”
“Can you fix it?”
You set the watch back down, looking back up at him with a little grin.
“For a price, Commander .”
Dainsleif swallows, rolling his shoulders back and digging out his wallet.
It takes you four hours to fix his ancient watch, and you even get the rust off of the band for him. You clasp it back around his wrist and tell him to get back to work when he tries to thank you, standing around for way too long. When he leaves, you set aside and refund his money.
15 years after the Cataclysm.
“What do you mean you can’t fix it?”
“They call us horologists, sir. Not magicians.”
Dainsleif huffs, leaning on the counter and shaking his head. “My friend recommended you,” he says, pleads. “He said you can fix anything. Even this. Did you try?”
“I—”
“Try.”
The watchmaker tilts his head, an unsure look on his face. Dainslef’s shoulders fall. “ Please ,” he whispers. “Try.”
The man purses his lips, sighing, and extends a hand. His fingers wriggle.
“For a price.”
Dainsleif takes out his wallet and pays him double what he paid you — the watch takes four days to fix, and he doesn’t remove the rust. Dainsleif collects it with haste.
“Sorry, couldn’t change the time,” he tells his client. “That thing will always run backwards.”
Dainsleif nods. “Oh.”
Four.
Your favourite day is Sunday.
Dainsleif allows himself one day to relax, one day that he’s mandated, and what day other than a day reserved for a god you never had would be a better fit? On Sundays, you stay in bed, under your linen sheets and against his chest. Neither of you move until absolutely necessary; sometimes hours, sometimes less.
“Breakfast soon?” he asks.
“I thought maybe a little while longer.”
“That’s fine.”
“Ugh, I love it when you agree with me,” you tease, giggling when he scoffs. He agrees with you most of the time; you’re reasonable people.
Dainsleif sighs, humming when you curl further into his side. Dainsleif is a serious guy, but that doesn’t count on Sundays. Not during your beautiful, godless mornings. He raises an eyebrow at the vase on your dresser, “Those are new.”
“Hm?”
“Inteyvats,” he comments, “the flowers.”
“Is it so wrong of me to show some nationalism, Dain?”
He grins, shaking his head as you laugh. You laugh and it shakes your shoulders. You laugh and it shakes his chest.
“I just didn’t know you liked them,” he says, “that’s all.”
You settle, humming against the cotton of his shirt. “I love them.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” you nod, “so much so that, maybe someday, we’ll have someone to use their name.”
He thinks for a moment, “A daughter?”
You tilt your head back so you can see him, to the point where it aches to hold yourself up like that. “Would that be so bad?”
Dainsleif thinks for a moment — you and a daughter. “No,” he says, “not at all.”
“That’s down the road, anyway,” you laugh. “You know what isn’t?”
“What?”
“Our anniversary,” you say, pressing a kiss to his jaw. “How do you want to celebrate it?”
Dainsleif thinks about your one year anniversary, lying in bed with you on a Sunday, talking about a family and the flower you’ll start it with. He thinks about how content he would be if you did nothing at all but this; lie against his side and kiss his jaw, talk about the daughter he hopes will look just like you. He doesn’t think he could ask for anything more.
“This is okay.”
“Mm, alright,” you say, your smile against his collarbone. “ I love you .”
Dainsleif tilts his head so you can stay where you are. “I love you," he echoes, "I love how you speak our language,”
“Oh? What’s so special about it?”
He smiles to himself.
“Tell me you love me again.”
Fifty years since the end of the world.
The watch breaks again on what would’ve been your seventy-fifth birthday.
The smith Dainsleif found this time looks over the stuttering clock hands, the numbers written in something unintelligible to him. He tosses it in his hand, a curious look on his face. “Old watch, no?”
“Very. Could you restore it?”
“By ‘restore’ you mean…”
“Fix it to tell time,” he clarifies. “And to still tick backwards.”
The clocksmith looks up with curious eyes, one of his eyebrows quirking up. “You want me to fix it ... to be broken?”
“If you can.”
He hesitates. “I’ll do my best.”
Dainsleif lets him swivel around in his chair, flicking a light on over his desk as he hunches over. The shop he operates out of is personal, messy — never Dainsleif’s style, but he can admit it is quaint. Quilts and sewn tapestries line the walls, textbooks from the Akademiya line a bookcase filled with papers; a frame hangs on the wall.
A painting of a flower; inteyvat .
“Excuse me,” Dainsleif coughs, “I can’t help but notice your painting.”
“Hm? Oh, the flower.”
“Yes — you know where it’s from?”
The smith hums a laugh, nodding. “Khaenri’ah hasn’t been gone long enough to forget it.”
Dainsleif swallows. “I was just surprised to see it, is all.”
“Most are,” he replies, his eyes not leaving the watch he works on. He rummages through his drawer for tweezers. “It was a gift for my daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes,” he replies, happily. “We named her after them.”
Dainsleif takes a deep breath.
Three.
When Dainsleif comes home from his shift, you’re sitting at the table with your chin resting in your hands.
“Good evening,” he greets, shrugging off his jacket and kicking off his boots. He doesn’t seem to notice that you don’t reply in the twenty or so seconds it takes to writhe out of his uniform, or that you don’t bother to even look in his direction at all. The only time he realizes that something in the room has shifted is when you move away from his kiss. “Hello?”
You grit your teeth.
Dainsleif crosses his arms, slowly rounding the table to face you from across it. “What is it?”
You look up at him, finally. “Where’s my blueprint, Dain?”
He blinks. “I — your what?”
“Don’t act dumb,” you say with a pointed finger, your head shaking. Your body might as well be, too. “My analog blueprints, digital ones — they’re all gone and guess who is the only one I trusted enough to tell?”
He opens his mouth, closes it. “It wasn’t me,”
“ Who else was it, then?” you shout, standing up to try and match his height. “Who? Tell me, Dainsleif, who else could it have been?”
He swallows, pulling one of your dining table chairs out. It squeals against the floor like it hates him just as much as you do. “Sit, please.”
“You know what I think, Dain?”
“Sit down, please.”
“I think you stole them for the factories you Guards don’t tell anyone about,” you whisper, “the bolted soldiers you make.”
“They’re field tillers,”
“Field tillers don’t have missiles in their chest,” you spit. The air thickens as you shake your head.
He gestures to the seat you once sat in, but you don’t bite. Not that easily, not ever.
“Lie to me again and I’m gone for good.”
Dainsleif swallows again, folding his hands and looking down at them. You’re scorned and he’s holding the heat; there is no explanation he can offer that makes this look any bit okay to either of you. He’s dug his grave — now, he lies in it, shovel at his side.
“Tell me,” you plead, “tell me what you’re making an army for.”
Dainsleif shakes his head.
“Gods don’t like godless men,” he says, so low you hardly hear him. So simple, like he's being reasonable.
You shake your own. “Godless men don’t even like themselves.”
His eyes meet yours.
“I want my designs back,” you tell him, more desperate than you let on. “Every page, every scribble, everything. And I don’t want anything made with them.”
Dainsleif takes a deep breath, his eyes averting themselves back down to the table. He doesn’t need to see your face anymore — not when he knows you’ll hate him once he tells you.
“You can’t.”
“You—”
“I can’t ,” he says. “It’s too late.”
150 years.
“Wow, this watch is beat.”
“It is — can you fix it?”
This one is in Fontaine, the clocksmith is — she’s eclectic, a little disorganized like you were, with a scary love for crushed velvet by the look of her shop. There’s metal dust everywhere and things that don’t belong to clocks or watches, but someone swore up and down she knows her stuff. Knows it well, too.
She looks back up at Dainsleif with a wink. “Got Mora?”
He tosses a pouch on the counter. “Anything you need.”
He doesn’t bother watching what she takes from it, instead opting to turn and watch the bustling streets outside. He’s fond of Fontaine, it’s full of life and running water — every shop is full from wall to wall.
The girl he’s trusting to fix his watch is trying to speak to him, but he’s not listening; all he can see is the eye of a Ruin Guard that hangs in the window of a pawn shop across the street; marked down to half value, less if you trade-in for credit. Dainsleif thinks about the lives those parts were worth almost two centuries ago.
No one in Khaenri’ah was ever worth just a couple hundred coins.
Two.
Taverns in Khaenri’ah have so many songs that they fill walls with lyrics.
They are loud and they are lively — you know something’s wrong when you catch one quiet and half-empty. The windows all made of stained glass, rustic to contrast the world around them; taverns in Khaenri’ah are like a world of their own. In them, people dance like such.
You dance that way, yourself. Not with him, but it’s nice to watch you spin again.
Dainsleif watches you clutch someone’s shoulder; he doesn’t know who he is but he’s wearing his uniform, someone he leads. He thinks he remembers you saying that you made an exception for him — you don’t date ‘snobs from the Royal Guard.’
(Dainsleif has hope that, maybe, you still remember your pact and, maybe, you try to keep it now.)
The wooden floors groan beneath stomping feet and gliding boots, the room a whirlwind of exhausted workers and the select few from the Guard that deem little places like this worthy of their presence.
He catches your eye for a second, only one, but your smile fades quick enough for your dancing partner to whisk you around again. A blur of your dress, and then, you’re grinning again.
Halfdan sets a drink down on the bar in front of him, kicking out the stool beside Dainsleif and sitting down. He follows his commander’s eyes and they land on you; they typically do on Friday nights.
“It’s alright,” Halfdan says, with a heavy-handed pat on his back. “Everyone has the one that got away.”
Dainsleif shakes his head, you laugh against his knight’s chest. “It’s different.”
“How so?”
“It does not matter, now, does it?”
“Mm, and yet, you’re still watching her.”
Dainsleif sips on the drink that was brought to him, turning to face the bar instead. Halfdan purses his lips, drumming his fingers on the table.
“You know,” Halfdan says, “I worry about the … f ield tillers .”
Dainsleif nods. “They’ll work.”
“Godless doesn’t mean we need to create our own, Captain,”
“You don’t know the things that I do,” Dainsleif cuts, harsh but not mean. “All of this has been discussed before. Let us make the orders, Halfdan, let yourself follow them.”
Halfdan hesitates.
“Captain Dainsleif,”
“Halfdan.”
“I apologize for overstepping,” he says, “but I’m just afraid of what will happen to us.”
Dainsleif rolls his shoulders back, nodding subtly. He clinks the bottom of his glass against the table.
“I am too,” he replies, tilting his head back and his glass up.
When he sets his glass back down, swallowing with a wince, he turns around. You’re the only one still on the floor, and you’re looking right at him.
500 years.
Dainsleif has spent his life figuring out where to drink. He finds that Mondstadt is the best place to.
The taverns there are quiet enough, and he isn’t bothered by anyone — they’re less lively than the ones way back when. It's a blessing that he isn’t haunted by the laughter, and a curse that he forgets what it sounds like. The tap beer is good, too. Mondstadt only serves you in bottles or chilled glasses.
But Dainsleif knows that no good comes after two in the morning, and nothing good comes from watching the Knights of Favonius pour in.
(It’s a little too familiar; he’s watching his bloodied soldiers laugh and topple to the bar.)
Dainsleif leaves enough Mora to cover his tab and tip, and bolts for the door.
He makes a beeline through the center, cutting the body of the bar in two as these faces he recognizes comment on his attire. He knows he looks like a fish out of water, he feels like a fish out of water. Five hundred years spent in this place and he still feels hated — he’s sure the next five centuries won’t change.
He knocks shoulders with someone near the door: “Woah there, pretty small hallway this must be, huh?”
He’s about to apologize, too, maybe count it as his crooked form of atonement, until he looks the guy he hit in the eye. Yes, eye — there's only one showing. The other hides beneath an eye patch.
He’s looking at him, but somehow, he’s now looking at you.
He’s lost in them, his eyes, and this new guy seems to notice — judging by the way he’s dressed, Dain guesses he’s a captain. He clears his throat.
“I know you’re heading out, but maybe another drink wouldn’t hurt?”
Dainsleif panics, because now he’s trapped. He doesn’t see you until he sleeps — not until he’s locked in bed somewhere, until it doesn’t matter what he says because no one else is there to listen but you and him. He can’t see you here, and he can’t see him.
“Sorry, but I’m afraid that I'm in a rush. I apologize for hitting you.”
(He doesn’t get very far.)
The man takes his wrist, making him turn around.
“Please?” he asks, but it’s not really begging. More like a proposition, probably. “I’m not sure how to say that in Khaenri’ahn.”
Dainsleif lets out a breath.
One.
It is your old day, Sunday , when Dainsleif enters your shop again, the broken watch on his wrist thrumming against his pulse point with every jerk of its hands.
The bell rings above your door and he’s almost surprised the door isn’t locked — he remembers unlocking it for you after he had to go, way back when. Kissing you goodbye, apologizing for holding up your business. You aren’t far, either; you come out with a smile that fades quicker than he likes to admit.
“Hi.”
“Hello,” he says, all too formal. He winces, almost. “Uh, it's broken again.”
“Of course it did. It’s ancient.”
He just sighs a laugh, nodding, undoing it from his wrist, from beneath his sleeve. “Yes, it is. Do you think you can fix it again?”
You glance between him and the watch. Him, and the watch. “Let me see it.”
“Of course,”
“Okay.”
You examine it with delicate fingers, screwing off the back of the body with a small driver, squinting at its insides. Dainsleif watches you.
“Dain, this thing isn’t gonna last long.”
“I don’t mind. I can pay double.”
“Why do you like this watch so much?” you laugh, dropping it on the counter and crossing your arms. “I mean, they don’t pay you enough for a digital?”
Dainsleif shakes his head. “I like this one.” He coughs. “You fixed it, first.”
“Yeah, and I’m shocked it still works.”
“You craft well.”
The two of you don’t speak for a moment; you dwell on the watch, its body pulled apart on the table. Your fingers pull at your threading jeans, and Dainsleif must see you mutilating your pants because he leans on the counter, lowers himself to you.
He lets you look at him for a moment. “What is it?”
“Nothing,”
“What is it?” he asks again, like it isn’t the second time.
You take a deep breath, tilting your head up.
“I’m sorry about your designs. Every day.” He shakes his head, looking in behind you. Your desk is still full of paper. “I will reap what I sow one day, and that’s the only comfort I can give you.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry. Endlessly, I am.”
You huff. “I’ve had better things since. It’s not what bugs me, Dain.”
“What is it, then, my dear?”
Your tongue pushes against your cheek, regretful hands reaching out to grip his own. It’s like you know you’re doing yourself no favours, but you’ve always been a masochist.
“Are we going to be okay?” you ask. “Not us. This place.”
He can tell you’ve been sitting with this thought alone, he’s just not sure how long. Since you brought up the field tillers? Since his last expedition? When was he last here, he’s not entirely sure.
His thumb wipes over your knuckles. He doesn’t tell you whether you’re going to be okay.
“I will protect you,” he whispers, “even in my dying breath.”
500 years.
The second time he meets the Traveller is when they ask him.
“What happened to Khaenri’ah?”
ZERO.
There is little you can see in smoke and ash. What Dainsleif can see, it is blurry and most likely dead.
(He doesn’t want to think about what happens to those who live — simply surviving is not enough, they’ll seek retribution in them, too.)
He feels guilty for saying it, but he was glad when the castle fell — relinquished of his sworn duty, free to run to where your shop lives. It came down in a blow of fire, the castle did; more than just four mighty walls, built of minerals made to last. He’s afraid to think of what happens to simpler stones.
(He runs like you stand a chance.)
He’s running in the opposite direction of other people — hell, he’s directing them out of there. Whatever is behind them is a lost cause, for him it’s a little hope. The havoc being brought down on this place is proof that they’re not allowed to have hope, but he promises it’ll be his last bit. He’s assuming they can hear him when he prays for it.
The windows of your shop are blown out. He ignores the sound of crunching glass because you’re screaming his name.
(You stop when you see him, swallowing it. He drops to his knees and says you’re allowed to yell, even when he’s there.)
“Dain,”
“Just breathe, hold on,” he breathes, chest pumping as he starts to heave the rubble off of you, the thick pillars that bar you from moving. He lifts one, another falls down. He lifts that one, and another, and another.
“Dainsleif.”
He’s still heaving, grunting now. Sweat lines his forehead and he’s coughing up soot he smelt ages ago.
“ Dain ,”
He’s crying.
“ Dainsleif ,” you spit, grabbing his wrist. You shake your head. “You’re hurting me.”
“I have to get you out,”
“To where?” you whisper, voice shaking. “Where are we going to go?”
Dainsleif doesn’t cry intentionally. His eyes are so wet that he can’t see clearly and they’re cleaning off his cheeks, but if tears were invisible you would never be able to tell.
You shake your head. “I’m not going to die in the street.”
“Don’t be so blunt, dear, please .”
“There is no other way to p-put it,” you say with a shiver, swallowing the hurt that threatens to spill out between your teeth; you smile instead. You feel weak already, even weaker in front of a commander. “Don’t cry,”
“I can’t stop it,” he chokes, shaking his head. He cradles your head in his lap, brushes back your hair until his fingers get caught in knots. “There is nothing I can do.”
The weight of your life is in his lap, and he thinks about tomorrow. One, or both of you, will be dead, and yet that weight will still be there.
“There’s no one but the gods that could stop this, Dain,”
“I—”
“I love you,” you gasp, “I forgive you. I love you.”
“No.”
“Say it back, you stubborn, stubborn man,” you grit.
(Dainsleif keels over you, and he says it back. He repeats it until he feels your grip on him loosen, until your head lulls the other way. He repeats it until he feels sick and out of breath, because he knows he will never say it again. He repeats it until he's about to gag.)
He remains in your shop for the next few hours, unmoving, leaned up against the front desk that amazingly still stands. He’s holding your hand.
Dainsleif waits for something. Probably a sentence, to death or otherwise. He waits here for a chance for the roof to cave in, or to be struck down by someone that finds him. He hopes the gods get to him. He hopes this shop still stands if they pry him out of it. He hopes they call him Atlas and tell him to hold it up.
“This watch is never gonna work.”
Dainsleif blinks at the man across the counter, who looks at him with raised eyebrows — probably in shock that he even thought it was fixable — and a condescending frown. “You are sure?”
“Dude, this wasn’t supposed to work the last time you had it fixed. This looks like it’s centuries old.”
“It…”
Is . He doesn’t finish that.
“It’s an heirloom,” he says instead. “It's impossible, then?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m pretty good at what I do, but this is … miracle talk. This should have been up-cycled three hundred years ago.”
“I see.”
The two men stand in silence for a moment, and the clocksmith brings a hand down on the watch.
When he strikes it, he knocks the last bits of air out of its lungs; the watch ticks a final one , two , three times, and Dainsleif hears laughter to his left.
He turns, and there you are. You’re sitting on a bench, alive , breathing. You’re holding a popsicle and leaning back like you don’t have a care in the world.
Dainsleif thinks of all the things you can say to him. That you blame him, that you love him, that you hate what he did. That you wish he could save everyone, that you wish he could’ve maybe saved you. That you’re thankful you died and never had to live as a curse. That you think of him, too.
You don’t do any of that.
Instead, you smile, close-lipped and gentle. And you wave.
The watch stops after the third tick. He loses you in a blink for one second, and you’re gone.
“Can you hit it again?”
“When I tell you that was its last life, I really mean it. I’d guess it had ten of them.”
He swallows, nodding, staring down at his broken watch. He’ll never see you again, hear it tick three times and go back to your bed on Sunday, hear it tick three times and listen to you say you love him in his native tongue. He’ll never go home, but he’s glad he saw you one more time.
He’ll never go home, but he’s glad he saw it one more time.
“So? You gonna try and bargain, or…?”
Dainsleif is staring at the bench you were just in; his fingers itch for it. If he has to spend the next lifetime looking at that bench, he’s going to do it alone, and he’s going to learn how to do it without you.
You deserve to rest — he was the one cursed to live forever, not you. You did not die in vain.
He turns back to the clocksmith, who honestly looks bored of him by now.
“Can I sell the parts?”