When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? - Virginia Woolf

The fewer details she shared with Paimon the better.

In fact, Lumine kept every last detail all to herself. She thought about consulting with someone but couldn't decide where to even start that conversation, much less who to approach.

'Hey, Yanfei, what terms should I include in a contract with someone when they're supposed to teach me something, they haven't asked for anything in return, but at some point during the lessons we might have sex?'

'Xiangling, how do I tell a man that I'm not horrified at the prospect that we might potentially, maybe, eventually, won't-intend-to-but-these-things-happen, you know, fu–'

"Lumine?"

The traveler jolted out of her thoughts and shook her head. "Ah, I think those were the only signs I saw today…"

"Sorry Zhihua!" Paimon said, shrugging. "Better luck next time!"

His shoulders sagged. "I'll go back to Qiming and ask her what I should be on the lookout for… Last time she said ducks mate for life, but then she refused to give me a straight answer when I asked if I would find love the next time I saw a pair of ducks… I've been checking all of the ponds nearby every day since then…"

"Sounds rough." Paimon did not sound remotely sympathetic. "Well, maybe try looking for someone to go out with while you're checking out the ducks."

Zhihua nodded, groaned, sat down heavily on the stone harbor steps, and looked defeated. Lumine and Paimon exchanged exasperated looks and turned away.

"Come on, we've got to run by the Adventurer's Guild before you have to meet, uh," Paimon checked to make sure they were out of Zhihua's earshot then continued in a loud whisper. "You-know-who!"

That made him sound like a villain, but all the same, Paimon was right. At least Liyue Katheryne wasn't nearly as chatty as the Inazuma one. Still, the traveler would be busy right up until the last minute and should slide into the teapot just shy of late.

Heads he got there early, tails he went on time.

He was already leaning toward the first option. According to his mother, 'on time' meant you were late, and actually showing up late was unacceptable.

Childe flipped the Mora and knew while it was still in the air that he would get to the Teapot before Lumine. She was too busy, too driven, too dependable – she would spend all morning doing commissions for the guild, rescuing kittens out of trees, helping little old ladies get across the street. That's just who she was.

Not to say he slept in and lazed about all day. He had his own daily missions. He fought things, trained, gave orders, got stuff done. But he didn't build a reputation as the most helpful guy in Liyue Harbor or anywhere else.

He arrived at her front door well before the appointed time – acceptably early by his mother's standards, at least – and the teapot spirit told him to, 'wait inside and make himself comfortable.' He hurried in, hoping Tubby wouldn't notice his ears turning red, and tried to actually make good on that instruction.

They would need parchment, ink, and a brush to write their contract down. He already had his proposed terms drafted, but she might want to negotiate some adjustments to the wording. Childe gingerly poked around the estate until he found a room full of red cedar furniture, a study where he could easily imagine Zhongli feeling at home. There was a complete set of writing tools but no blank paper in sight. He set his pages down on the desk and stepped around it.

He started pulling tubes rolled parchment off of a shelf and wished he could tell which ones had already been written on without having to unroll them.

"Welcome home!" The teapot spirit was just barely audible through the floor and multiple walls. "Your expected guest is waiting for you in the second story South-side inner room."

Fuck. He didn't want her to open the door, see him holding some of her scrolls, and think he was going through her stuff. He quickly yet carefully shoved each paper roll back onto the curio stand and hastily slid into the closest chair, just managing to make himself look natural by the time he heard her footsteps outside the door.

"Childe?" she said, peeking her head into the room. "Oh, you're in here…" Her face tilted and she chuckled lightly. "Are you sitting there because that's the side the teacher goes on?"

He froze.

He was on the wrong side of the desk. At least now he knew why it felt familiar. Why he had felt like he was in a Zhongli-inspired space. Because there was a room with a similar layout in Wangsheng Funeral Parlor for private talks with clients, and he'd been alone in there with Zhongli once, and… the old dragon had made some comment about a play he saw however many years back, with a pair of torrid lovers, and… then they had…

That's what this room looks like.

It's the same shape as the set of an uninspired, borderline pornographic stage play, with a star-crossed romance between a student and an instructor, and he is unintentionally sitting on the side for the teacher, the boss, the authority figure... The room's composition is biased towards him, so the space between the desk and the bookshelf behind him is narrower, leaving him already cornered in case she attacks directly…

For instance, by crawling across the table.

Not that he was picturing her doing that.

It just came to mind… as an example…

They were in her house, she should have been in the more powerful seat by default, since she owned and commanded the territory. By switching, he was making a statement against the status quo and implying he was in the more powerful role in the dynamic. As her teacher.

Because that's what they would be – and it felt like swimming upstream for him to be the leader and her the follower. It felt upside down. Even merely skimming the surface of thinking about it, blood was already rushing away from his head.

Fuck. No time to process that or recover from it.

"N-no!" Great, of course, he had to stutter immediately and blow any possible cover of glib nonchalance. "I just figured this would be the best place to focus and thought I should save you the chair closer to the door, since I got here too early, so you wouldn't be forced to walk past me in order to sit down. You know. As a matter of business etiquette."

Wow. He wanted to pat himself on the back for thinking so fast and coming up with a plausible excuse on the fly, but he definitely hadn't been thinking at all. That was just what happened to come out of his mouth when he let his jaw fall open and prayed that rational sounds might follow.

"Oh," Lumine said. Her shoulders fell slightly. "That's… polite of you."

He was waiting in the wrong room.

Childe had already sat down and spread out papers on the desk in the second floor South-side room, which was the smaller room on the floor.

The other room on the second floor could fit both the "Strategic Six" meeting room set and the Cloudy Haze Dream-Court set. If only they had arrived at the same time, she could have led them both straight to that room, and if he questioned where the couch from their last meeting had gone, she could casually say she was rearranging furniture throughout the house. Then it was just a simple matter of not drawing his attention to the Liyue-style bed in the corner.

A bed they probably wouldn't need today, but. She was trying to get him to get used to the idea. And she figured the best method for doing that was the same technique used to boil frogs: get him into a neutral environment and turn up the heat so slowly that he wouldn't notice her doing it until it was too late.

If she made them relocate now, wouldn't he question it?

The Favonius conference table in the bigger room was larger than the calligraphy table in this room, but it didn't look like they needed more space to write on… So he would be able to tell there was some other reason for the move. She would actually need to take the calligraphy set from this room into the other one, because it didn't have one… The larger room had a tea set? Was that a good enough excuse to change locations?

When she first walked in he had clearly just sat down and tried to make himself look relaxed, but even acting 'normal' was outside of his performance skill set. Maybe he had been checking out the other rooms? So he might already know that the northern room has a bed in it…

Well, if subtle social engineering had failed, all that remained was directness. "I wanted to meet in the other room on this floor," she said. "There's more space, a bigger table, and some other furniture we may end up using."

His eyes widened, then he nodded mechanically and stood, swiftly collecting his small stack of sheets. "Right, lead the way!" That was almost back to his regular voice, with a hint of added relief, like he thought he had gotten away with something without getting caught, or just managed to escape some kind of pitfall trap.

He followed behind her like a duckling and didn't question her for carrying the calligraphy set from room to room.

Childe was not prepared for this.

Sure, he had a four page draft of their service agreement.

Yes, he had compared what he wrote with an existing template.

And yeah, said 'template' was actually a limited partnership agreement that Mr. Zhongli the Funeral Parlor Consultant had made him sign when they first started hooking up, back when Childe thought he was a stuffed shirt, not a dragon wearing a human costume.

And of course, even if something sexual happened, it would hardly be the first time he had fucked someone in the course of training or practicing Electro.

But even so.

There was something about sitting across from Lumine at a conference table, their knees nearly close enough to knock against one another, and knowing she had basically said she wouldn't mind if they maybe, eventually, one day had sex…

He was not ready for how distracting it would be to have that background knowledge.

And he wasn't even into knees or anything like that, but still, no amount of mental recitation of unsexy information was making him any less tense.

Childe cleared his throat. Lumine had been looking at something over his shoulder, but refocused her eyes on him at the sound. "So," he said. "This is what I came up with." He tapped his papers, gently pushed them towards her, then gestured across the table at her with an open hand. "What do you have?"

She seemed to flex her fingers subconsciously. He watched the miniscule movement and wondered at it. Was she feeling embarrassed? Because she had no pages of pre-written clauses like he did? Was she wishing she had something to hold onto while she explained what she wanted?

"I, well," and his ears were starting to grow warmer in a sympathetic blush. She typically spoke so little, preferring to let Paimon state the obvious on her behalf, and when she did speak, she so very, very rarely used filler words such as, 'like,' or 'um.' That 'well' had sounded like a stammer, like someone who wanted desperately to be anywhere else, or to have the right words at hand, and hated that they didn't. She spoke again and was clearly trying to sound breezy and casual, fake-confident in having the right answer. "Just, you know. Teach me to the best of your ability, I guess."

His fingers twitched. For what, he wasn't sure. His own papers? Or did he want to squeeze her fingers in between his own and comfort her nerves? "That's it?" He said, relieved that his voice sounded focused on the thread of their actual conversation even if his eyes and hands weren't. "That's all you've got?"

She squirmed under his incredulous stare. A flush of desire raced through him. He could tell he was getting hard and it took all of his meagre professionalism to not react to that, not to groan at the sensation, not even to cringe at the timing, nothing. He only registered it at all as a simple thought: I want to make her do that again. I want to put her on her toes and make her feel the swelling anxiety of failure, exposure; I want to make her heart race like a rabbit cornered by a fox.

"N-no!" That defensive, whimpering little stutter. She sounded like she was pouting but if he looked at her lips to confirm it, he wouldn't be able to stop himself. She would be the death of him. "Listen, I'm not saying it right, but I am making a good point here."

Childe hummed encouragingly and smiled and nodded and condescended, and was rewarded when she stretched one arm over the table and flicked the back of his hand. He was justified in trying to dodge the attack and in using the opportunity to very reasonably take hold of her hand. Her voice caught for just a second, stumbling over her next words, leaving him a beat to chime in, "Go on." He smirked and tightened his grip on her fingers momentarily before letting go.

The traveler sat up straighter and narrowed her eyes. "Don't hold back. If you half-ass my training or cut corners, I won't reach my full potential. Don't go easy on me."

He swallowed hard, and she definitely saw it because her eyes went wide and her cheeks reddened. That would have sounded suggestive even if she thought the training merely entailed hard physical labor and ordinary athletic stamina. It would have evoked images of every time her breath came out hard and fast during their fights, reminded him of the path of each droplet of sweat that had rolled down her body under his watchful gaze.

But she knew this particular questline would likely lead to sex. More than likely, actually, because he had already told her that most or all of the electro students and trainers he knew had fucked eventually.

'Go hard on me?' She was really going to say that to him?

Was it more exciting if she had said it artlessly or artfully? Blushing ingenue Lumine was dead sexy, but seductive brat Lumine was erotic too.

Then he caught sight of the barest hint of uncertainty flickering in her eyes, and his arousal was doused in an instant.

He would only have a willing partner. He was on high alert, overly sensitive and unyielding, looking for signs that she might fear regretting it if she slept with him.

"Okay, right," he said, getting back onto the sexless track. He flipped one of the sheets of paper with his own terms and started writing on the back of the page. "I could put it like this: don't do anything to hamper your progress, don't stop the training prematurely or by any means cause your Electro control to be underdeveloped. Train you in good faith with the objective of helping you get as powerful and proficient at Electro as you can be. Anything else?"

She was worrying her bottom lip with her teeth, and his breathing briefly hitched. He would have thought that she was now being openly flirtatious, except there was genuine dismay in her expression.

Lumine had, in fact, thought of something else she wanted.

(She had thought of several somethings, stuff she wanted him to do, to her, preferably soon, as his eyes grew steadily darker the longer he looked at her.)

Unfortunately, this one wasn't exciting in a skin-tingling-in-anticipation way. It was a bit sad, but it felt important, and she could take the edge off of it but she couldn't keep it from cutting.

She wanted to ask for it, because she knew she'd end up needing it.

But she also didn't want to ask, since she knew it would make him think she didn't trust him.

Childe got better at reading her all the time and had already leaned forward with an curious expression. "There's something on your mind. Say it. This is why I wanted us to take a couple of days to think this whole thing over. I don't want you to be left with any reluctance or hesitation." She was silent. He tried again with a more commanding tone, a voice that draped itself around her neck and felt like it was tickling her ears even though he was on the other side of the table from her. "Lumine. Tell me."

"Can I add a term… requiring you to answer my questions honestly? While we're training? As long as it's about the training? If it's confidential you can say no, and you can even tell me if you're just not comfortable answering… But you can't tell me anything misleading or false."

He paused. She tried to think through the ways that agreeing might possibly force him to divulge protected Fatui secrets. Nothing jumped out. She had left him several outs. "Answer any question honestly…" he clarified. "Specifically when it's about the training?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Okay," he smiled.

"Okay?"

"Yeah."

He didn't look hurt. He didn't look like he was going to dwell on it. He didn't seem offended at the suggestion that he might lie, and she needed to protect herself from his dishonesty. He looked like he was just taking it at face value and readily agreeing to whatever would make her more comfortable.

Time would tell if that was how he really felt or just the first convincing mask he'd managed to wear, but she didn't want to start being suspicious and doubtful so soon after he agreed to tell the truth.

She wanted to trust him, so she did.