I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
- e. e. cummings
"You know, reading assignments are the laziest kind of homework you can give, as a teacher," Lumine said. She flipped a page so brusquely, she seemed to be trying to tear it from the book – or like she was completely apathetic about whether it tore.
Paimon didn't bother looking up. She was laying on her stomach, idly kicking her legs in the air, and reading a light novel they had bought at Yae Publishing House. "You said that already. Like an hour ago," she sniffed.
Lumine balled up some paper and tossed it in Paimon's general direction. It bounced off a pillow, rolled across Paimon's back, and landed on the floor beside the couch. Paimon snorted in a way that seemed to imply, 'Missed me!'
"Even if I am repetitive, I'm not wrong." The traveler pushed herself away from the table and shoved her book away. She wanted to create as much distance between herself and the text as she could without toppling her chair over.
Another page of Paimon's light novel flipped with a crisp rustling sound. "You're just mad 'cause Childe made you reschedule your first official Electro training session, 'cause somebody hadn't even started on the reading when you were originally supposed to meet."
Scowling, Lumine turned her attention back to the textbook on the table. "Shut up," she grumbled. She was quiet for a moment but spoke again as soon as Paimon started to open her mouth to argue. "Now I'm just mad because you're right and I don't want to admit it, I know," Lumine said. "I get it. You've made your point. Again."
The fairy snickered. Paimon floated up from the couch with her book until she was hovering upright as if standing on thin air. "See? You can learn! You're doing it already. That's a good sign for your lesson going well!" Paimon beamed and then twisted in the air to zoom over to the front door. "Well, speaking of the lesson, Paimon's going to hang out at the duck pond on the opposite end of the teapot. Come get me when it's safe to come back!"
And she vanished.
(Paimon had already declared – emphatically and often – that she would do, 'whatever it took to make sure Paimon doesn't walk in on anything.')
Lumine savored the solitude and spared a few minutes in solemn contemplation of exactly how right she was.
All Childe had to do was tell her what books to get and say, "Read them." No effort at all.
She had to go to the bookstore and check the shelves. She had to deal with Wanwen's ramshackle cataloging system. She had to ask Jifang where to find the books and say their titles out loud. Then she had to pay for the books and carry them around. All that before sitting down and actually reading them! An extraordinary amount of effort for a traveling adventurer. Lumine rarely had free time and even less often spent that time being sedentary.
So her assessment of him as a teacher was, thus far, not exactly glowing.
On the bright side, that meant his performance quality could only go up from here.
Even if this lesson was a flop, it couldn't be worse than spending her time in Inazuma. In the week since she had last seen Childe, she spent every night reading. Each day, she dealt with some new infuriating thing in the Electro Archon's country.
She'd had to jump through a half dozen hoops to get an audience with the Shirasagi Himegimi. Then she had been strong-armed into doing three favors for Ayaka. The favors themselves were a parade of horrors, one nightmarish cartful of clowns after another. Thinking about it made her head hurt and her stomach churn. If no one ever asked her for another inane, mail-carrying favor, it would be too soon. Still, she preferred that tedium over routine, casual displays of xenophobia and cruelty. Both ran rampant in Inazuma.
Then there was the matter of the voices she heard when she touched the statue of the Omnipresent God. That in and of itself was a ball of razor-sharp wire that she couldn't begin to unravel.
Everything about Inazuma gave her the distinct feeling of circling around a drain. The whole situation reeked of dread and inevitability.
'I'm not going to be able to meet the Shogun without fighting her, am I?' she kept thinking. She wanted to ask that question to everyone who had offered to 'help' her since Beidou dropped her off.
It seemed like that was going to be the case. She would have to bring an entire civil war to an end before getting a chance to ask the Archon a few simple questions. Despite the fact that she had already decided her brother was her top priority. Even if she had said, firm and clear, that she didn't want to get involved.
'Too bad.' They didn't say it out loud, but she heard it. She could see the words mouthed on every face in Inazuma, young and old. 'Too bad.'
Did she want to track Aether down? Collect information about him? Even enough to rule out this country as the place where she might be able to find him? Tough. Solve our crisis first. Fix our problems.
So she looked forward to this lesson more than she otherwise would have. Childe would be a break in the pattern. He wasn't going to ask her to do anything that would only benefit him. He was actually there to help her. He was going to come to her home to do a service for her, rather than demand her to perform one for him.
If nothing else Childe wouldn't ask Lumine to solve his problems, because he probably counted her as one of them.
He'd left the contract signing in such a cold mood. Then he had mailed her the cleaned-up version of the document without so much as a note attached. There was nothing personal about it, nothing friendly.
The worst was when they met up a week ago, when they should have had their first session. He'd been cold and distant from the moment they met up near the Golden House. Then, when she admitted she hadn't started reading the books yet, he barely contained his rage.
In truth, she'd earned a little of that, so she couldn't argue with him. She pushed him into teaching her. She was so insistent about it. Then she didn't even touch the books he had told her to read. It made her look lazy and ungrateful, and neither were qualities she wanted to embody.
Still, his reaction had seemed out of character.
It wasn't unusual for him to look like he wanted to fight her. When he did have that kind of expression, he looked excited, playful, eager. Carnivorous.
That day, he looked furious, almost as angry as he had back when he thought she had beaten him to the Gnosis. She let him walk away because she knew the alternative would be beating him until the will to fight left his body. She hated seeing him weakened like that. Bruises from spars were one thing; kicking him while he was down to ensure he wouldn't get back up? That sucked. But fighting him when he was well and truly pissed off could only end one way, and she wanted to avoid that outcome.
She held out hope that he might be back to his usual demeanor today. If not, she needed to figure out what was going on with him. Hopefully with words instead of fists.
Nervous, stumbling, unresolved sexual tension would have been fine. Fun, even.
Some kind of angry, simmering agitation between them? The pressure of being on a knife's edge? No. That spoke of unaired issues and resentment, and she wouldn't let either fester.
For this visit, he arrived a little closer to the agreed-upon hour. Early, but only just. More like 'right on time.'
Or as his mother would say; nearly late.
He trudged up the path, dragging his feet, and waved at the teapot spirit. "Your guest has arrived!" Tubby called inside.
Childe crossed his arms and leaned against the wall beside the front door. He was conscious of the fact that he must look ridiculous, heaving his tall, lanky frame into sullen poses. But even knowing that, he didn't care to correct it or cover up his frustration.
They hadn't seen each other in a week.
After the contract signing, he'd waited a couple of days, then sent her a message through the Adventurer's Guild. That was one of the most reliable ways to ensure she got it since she checked in with them daily.
So she received the message. They met up in Liyue. Neither of them mentioned her Osial comment. He tried to forget it, but it was like a pointy rock in his shoe, keeping him tense and uneasy. Then she mentioned that she hadn't even opened the books yet. And he boiled over.
"Those books are your first lesson. Second lesson: when I assign you homework, it's required. You need that information, and I can't teach you all of it as efficiently as a book can. We'll meet up once you've read them."
She had looked angry, but also guilty as charged, maybe even ashamed. Then he had walked away, and she made no attempt to follow or stop him.
That had been the last he saw or heard of her until today.
Well, except for her, "I'm almost done with the books, can we meet?" message. Someone from the Adventurer's Guild came to Northland Bank, radiating a familiar, anxious aura. Most people around Liyue seemed to feel that way about the Fatui in general and Childe in specific. But at least they delivered Lumine's message.
And that brought them all the way to –
– Lumine opened the front door and stepped to the side.
"Welcome," she said. And damn if she didn't sound pleased, even relieved to see him. It was hard to hold onto hostility when she was smiling at him like that. "I was finishing the last few pages of the physics book. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?"
The last few pages? There was no way they were going to get through all the material today. They might as well proceed with the lesson. But she hadn't asked if he wanted to wait while she finished, she asked if he wanted a drink.
"No, thank you," he said, defaulting to a well-mannered response. He stepped into the house and closed the door. When he turned back to face her, he realized he was right at the edge of her personal space.
People tended to keep a certain distance from her. No one seemed inclined to stand too close to her. Regardless of whether it was the kids playing pirate at the docks or members of the Qixing.
Childe knew it wasn't because they didn't like her. People admired her, so they didn't want her to feel crushed or swarmed. They wanted to leave a good impression on her and not come across as annoying or threatening. They thought she was a hero, and her reputation grew with every new feat or good deed. If they had ever seen her fight, they remembered their awe at her strength and skill. Some people could sense her raw power, something that went beyond weapons or elements.
The bubble of empty air around her was part recognition and part intuition. Either way, it was a sign of respect.
Still, there was something lonely about those little parenthetical spaces. Even the first time he'd laid eyes on her, waiting for Morax to descend, he'd noticed it. There was an unnatural gap in the crowd, and she was in its center.
Now he felt like he was encroaching on the buffer zone that usually existed between her and the rest of the world. His toes were on a boundary line.
He almost wanted to step back and give her more room.
At the same time, he almost stepped forward. It was all too easy to imagine reaching up and brushing her bangs back, tucking some hair behind one ear, tracing her jaw with his fingers...
Then he imagined those golden eyes filling with a knowing rebuke. A look that said she wasn't surprised that he would cross a line with her. As though she was already expecting him to.
That thought kept him motionless. His feet stayed right there on the line, and his hands stayed by his sides.
"You can finish the last bit of reading before our next session," he said, forcing a smile. "For now, let's leave the books here and find somewhere else to sit."
She looked uncertain yet relieved. "Okay… Indoors or outdoors? I've got some open areas that would be suitable for sparring, or I can set up targets."
He shook his head. "Indoors is fine."
…Inside the house but away from the books… Lumine narrowed her eyes. Well. She had finished putting together an Inazuma set in the west-side room on the first floor. That would work.
Childe was still giving off the impression that he was feeling some kind of way. Lumine couldn't tell if his stiltedness was a simple matter of being reluctantly horny or something deeper.
If eyes were windows to the soul, his had shutters.
His surface-level thoughts and moment-to-moment reactions were easy enough to discern. Below that, an unspoken darkness roiled and frothed. In the middle of a battle, she could look over and almost see a black ichor coating him. It was as though the blood of the abyss had soaked into his skin and would never wash clean. He tended to look unsatisfied unless he was fighting for his life - and enemies so seldom posed a real threat to him.
He would slice through whatever surrounded him, straighten up, and still seem hungry.
The restlessness that dogged him now… it felt different. Something new, something less ambiguous than usual, was bothering him. She anticipated that he would be too proud and too stubborn to admit anything that made him sound petty or oversensitive. So she'd have to find the right angle to attack him. In the meanwhile, she could make some circumspect attempts to get him talking.
"Ever sat at a kotatsu before?" she asked.
He shook his head slowly. He looked like he was calculating the odds that his long legs would fit under a table that small and low to the ground. The answer wasn't promising.
"You'll figure it out. It's just a table, it can't hurt you," she said. His eyes snapped up to hers, his cheeks colored, and his face had, 'Can you actually read my mind?' written all over it. She winked, then busied herself with clearing the decorative items off the table, so he could sit down while her back was turned.
The sounds of his knees knocking against the wood and the resultant hiss of pain were muted. Both were quiet enough that they could pretend as if nothing had happened and she hadn't heard it.
Lumine turned back to face him and smiled. He'd managed to get his legs under the table, but only by stretching them straight out in front of him. If they were any longer his feet would be poking out from under the blanket on the opposite side. He was simply too tall – or the table too short.
She knelt on a tea cushion next to him and shifted around until her legs were crossed. Her knees pressed into him – one on his knee and another pushed up against his thigh. He stiffened. She could see it in his spine and the way his posture tensed, and feel it in the contracting pull of his muscles where they were touching.
"So, how has your week been? Anything interesting going on?" she tried.
He took a few beats to process that question, and that seemed to douse his anxiety. Or possibly his interest.
"Fatui business. Nothing I can talk about," he said. "Let's get started, shall we? I'm going to quiz you a little about the material from the beginning of the book. No consequences for getting anything wrong, I just want to gauge how much you retained. And you'll have an easier time internalizing information once you explain it to someone else."
Ugh, was this why he wanted to sit in some other room, away from the books? So she would have to recall whatever she read earlier and couldn't reference the text?
The training couldn't be all books and tests and reciting facts. She cast a deliberate glance over to the Yumemiru bed behind him. Childe clearly saw where her gaze fell, but he was undeterred.
"Tell me what the difference between voltage and current is."
Lumine visualized the page in the book that had tried to use annotated illustrations to analogize the concepts. A lot of the pictures in the book compared Electro to a river. The voltage was the volume of water, and the current was the speed of water moving past a point.
"Current is…" she spoke slowly, trying to remember the words as they were written on the page. "...the rate of the flow of Electro, and voltage is the difference in Electro potential."
"That's word-for-word the definition from the book," he said, sighing. "Do you actually know what it means? Or are you just regurgitating it without having understood it?"
She bristled. "Of course I understand it, Childe! And how are you so sure that's exactly the same words from the book definition?"
He glowered. "I reread them each twice since we signed the contract."
Oh.
Two things occurred to her at once:
First, he had once again successfully distracted her from thinking about why he was in this strange, unfriendly mood. She had to make a move soon if she was going to confront him and find out what had upset him. She wanted to know today, not next session, not weeks from now, not after he had gotten over it. She had to keep that in mind and strike when she saw an opening.
Second, her evaluation of his teaching would have to be revised. He had not lazily given her reading assignments and then had the week off. When he told her to read those books, he read them too. Damn.
After processing those two, she had one more realization.
"Wait!" She started to move like she wanted to stand, as if she was so annoyed she wanted to be on her feet to express it, but her shins knocked into the side of his legs under the table. She leaned across the corner of the table instead, nearly growling in his face. With her big eyes and furrowed brow, she was less threatening, more cute and pouty. "If you already had the books, why did you make me buy them?"
"I only have my copies." He said, cocking his head to the side. "How could I reread mine if I gave them to you?"
Her eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed in suspicion. "You don't have spares for students?"
"No? I haven't taught anyone else – I haven't even trained with anyone since I left Snezhnaya."
Would that make her lose confidence in his ability to teach her?... Apparently not, she looked strangely pleased to hear it.
Had she been… jealous? About him… training other people?
No, he couldn't assume that. Maybe she was just smirking at some joke beyond his understanding.
Taking this little conversational detour had allowed him to remember something: he had intended to give her another disclaimer before they started the lessons in earnest. She wouldn't like it, but for his own conscience, it needed to be said.
"Speaking of which," he said slowly, already bracing for how she would react. "I've been thinking about what you said before, about not holding back. And I think... I need to explain why and how your training will not proceed exactly like the way the Fatui do it."
Her expression was full of rebellion and thunder. He could tell she wanted to protest, so he held up a hand to ward off her interruption.
"Please, let me finish." He placed both of his palms flat on the table and stared down at the surface, speaking his next words directly to the wood grain. "The Fatui were not overly concerned with consent. Most of the time, that just meant corporal punishment and the kind of hazing you might expect with any militant group. It…"
He faltered and fell silent. She was studying him intently, and he could feel the weight of her gaze.
"I cannot and will not recreate that environment for you," he said finally. He wrenched his eyes up from the table to look at her. "I enjoy our fights too much to say I would never hurt you, but I take no pleasure from seeing you in pain."