"Because of you, the heady perfumes of
Summer pain me; because of you, I again
Seek out the signs that precipitate desires:
Shooting stars, falling objects."
― Pablo Neruda
The first time Childe met the person who would train him in Electro was in the presence of the Tsaritsa, one Harbinger being assigned to another.
The second time, he went to find that person at their quarters. As he had been instructed, he knocked, retreated a few feet down the hallway, and settled in to wait.
Several minutes went by.
Then four Cicin Mages emerged from the other Harbinger's quarters in various disheveled states. They all paused and bowed politely as they passed 'Lord Tartaglia.' One very clearly had a pearlescent sheen of something smeared on her face. When she bent forward, a droplet landed near his boot. She wiped her chin with the side of her hand as she straightened, then maintained eye contact and licked the nameless fluid off.
He marched into the senior Harbinger's room full of indignant rage and got about ten words into a diatribe about power dynamics and coercion.
In short order, he was a twitching pile of bones on the floor, and he had learned his first Electro lesson: do not question the trainer's methods. The "or else" did not need to be said. There were no threats or ultimatums. That lesson was taught one single time, and it was demonstrated so clearly as to not bear repeating.
"Would you like to elaborate on what it was like?"
"I would not."
Lumine rested her chin on her hand and observed her tutor.
He looked… a bit worse for wear. Not sick, but perhaps like he had not been sleeping well, and also like he had just remembered something unpleasant. The 'traumatic incident' kind of unpleasant. Not mildly discomforting, like stepping in a puddle and discovering that there must be holes in your boots. More like the kind of memory you might wake up from in the middle of the night, gasping, nearly out of bed before you realize it was only a dream.
Not for the first time, she wanted to ask him to leave the Fatui and just become her full-time travel companion. He wouldn't agree to it, so she didn't ask, but the idea hung around on the tip of her tongue.
She would probably dream about it – soon, if not tonight.
By day she was paranoid and skeptical and always wanted to have a backup plan. She didn't trust luck and she always looked gift horses in the mouth. In her sleep, she would give in to unrestrained wish fulfillment. She dreamed of futures that could never possibly happen. Aether would be there, and Paimon and Childe, and all of them got along perfectly, and all of them were healthy and happy, and they would all live forever and never be parted.
"Should we get back to the lesson?" he said.
She nodded. He quizzed her on more Electro vocab, then moved onto the anatomy book, and had her rattle off the definitions of every part of the nervous system and brain.
"Okay, let's stop there for now," he said.
She immediately objected. "What? We're not stopping already, right? It's still so early! I set aside all day, I can cook if you want to take a break—"
He raised his hands in supplication, like a captured criminal putting their hands up when facing down a bow drawn by a bounty hunter. The universal symbol for, 'I mean you no harm.'
"No, I don't mean stop the lesson, I meant, like, let's switch activities," he explained.
Lumine was ordinarily so pale that when she blushed, he could watch it bloom on her skin. The shy flush of pink and the bright, angry red seemed to radiate across her cheeks, up and out of her ears, down her neck, and over her collarbones. He wondered if he could embarrass her even more and make the blush extend further.
"What were you thinking? Is there – what's next on your lesson plan?" she asked. She averted her eyes and put on the most innocent expression she could without literally whistling.
He grinned. "The practical portion. You need to develop a sense of how much Electro you're producing. That means it's time to do some shocking… Although, at first, it's more of a matter of getting shocked."
She tensed. Which was to be expected, if he was being honest. Right now she thought shocks were uniformly painful, and only knew them as something she flinched away from. Electro was something to be avoided.
"Hey, listen. This changed my whole outlook when I first started this training." Childe leaned towards her with a fox-like grin. "Based on what you read, what is pain?"
"A message, coded in Electro signals, sent through the nervous system to the brain," she said.
Another near-perfect recitation of the definition from the book, but he would let it slide this time. "And what's pleasure?"
She opened her mouth and then shut it again, preemptively hearing herself start to repeat her previous answer before issuing a single sound. "It's… also encoded and… sent to the brain, but… it must be a different message because the brain can tell the difference between when you're feeling pain somewhere in your body versus feeling… pleasure… right?"
"Can it?" He asked, cocking his head to the side. "When there's no actual damage to the body, no cut or bruise, and your brain has to judge whether it's receiving pain or pleasure signals, can it tell? Or does it look at the surrounding context clues and fill in the blank with its best guess?"
Lumine frowned. She looked like she thought he was trying to trick her into believing something absurd just to reveal it had been a joke all along. "You're saying that pain and pleasure are functionally the same experiences, and which one you think you're experiencing is based on the situation? That doesn't sound right."
"You're understating it. I'm saying, pain and pleasure are fungible. They're identical, you can perfectly replace one with the other. You can change your mind and make it so that something you previously considered painful becomes, instead, pleasurable." He spoke emphatically and confidently and she still didn't look convinced. His grin widened. "Girlie, do you like spicy food?"
She nodded.
"Even though other people think it hurts to eat it?"
Her face! Ah, her expressions just killed him. He wanted pictures, frozen like this, with her eyes full of suspicion in the process of being converted to awe, every muscle in her face rapt with wordless revelation.
"Is it that much of a stretch to imagine that some people genuinely enjoy other things, which you find painful?" he asked. And of course, it wasn't. If she had been listening at all – and her reactions made it clear that she had – she would, right now, be visualizing some minor, painful experience, and imagining responding to that stimuli with a hiss of ecstasy.
Now, to remind her what the objective of the lesson actually was.
"Vision holders have an effectively intuitive grasp of voltage and current, so they don't need to think about units of measurement," he said. She blinked, and mid-way through his sentence, she seemed to refocus on his words. He watched the fog clear from her mind. He could see her start to actually listen, then catch up on the beginning of his sentence. He gave her a beat to process what she'd initially missed. "People with Visions simply release as much energy as they intend to, as much as they feel like they should be releasing. The first thing you have to do as a non-native user of the element is try to get a feel for what it's like to put out a little bit of Electro or a lot."
The whole explanation was a lot to take in. He paused for a minute to let her digest it all.
While she was learning Electro, he would learn how to read her. He had a decent grasp to start with, but soon he'd have her down to an art form.
He was already picking up on more of her tells. When she'd latched on to something and was starting to connect the dots, she would narrow her eyes. Then her mouth would purse into a thin, little line, and right when she arrived at her conclusion, she'd tilt her head to the side. Always those three things, always in that order.
"Okay," she said finally. She seemed to take ideas he gave to her and lock them away. He could picture her layering words like bricks and building a vault, letting every lesson become a part of her fortress. "How do I do that? Every time I use Electro now, it just hurts."
"You get there by learning how it feels to have different amounts of Electro cast on you," he explained. She merely nodded. He sat at a small table with her, said he would try to be a gentle torturer, and she accepted it. This woman was something else. "Then you use that frame of reference to figure out how to turn the faucet without completely opening the floodgates. Exert some control. Let sparks fly from one only hand or another, but not both. Then a specific finger."
She raised her hands and stared at them, then looked to him. He nodded as if giving her permission – as if she needed it – and she seemed to take a bracing breath, then became still and silent.
Purple crackled between all ten fingers.
Lumine looked surprised, then irritated.
"Don't get discouraged when it's harder than you expect," he said, though, of course, she already appeared to be. "That's okay. That's normal. It's not like an extension of your body. Your brand new sense of your Electro isn't going to be fully functional, sensitive, and precise yet. Maybe that's what it's like for Vision users, but for you, it'll be like physical therapy after a serious injury. It'll take a little while before it feels familiar."
She closed her hands into fists and looked up at him, with a mischievous little smile that he ought to have known to be leery of by now. "So, when do we get to the part where you shock me?"
Minx. An absolute minx, and a menace.
"We're there now. We're at that part." He maliciously enjoyed the little stutter in her self-assured posture then felt reflexively guilty. But he could unabashedly enjoy watching the way she flexed her shoulders and rolled her neck in preparation.
She stuck her hand out for him to take. "Do your worst."
He smiled, and turned her palm down, pulling her knuckles up to his mouth. "Remember, girlie," he said, letting his lips brush against her skin. "You asked for this."
Then he fed around twenty-five volts through her palm, letting her feel like she had just touched a live wire.
Her body trembled, but she didn't jerk out of his grasp. He kissed the tips of her fingers and lowered her hand to the table. "The purpose of this exercise is to let you start recognizing different amounts of Electro by feel. That was a small dose, around twenty-five volts. It wasn't exactly a tickle, but it wasn't torture either, right?"
Lumine nodded. "I definitely felt a buzz, but no, I don't think I would say that it was painful."
"So remember that: twenty-five volts times skin-contact-level resistance equals light buzzing. Twenty-five volts from across a greater distance – more travel through air before contact means more resistance – would feel even weaker. Make sense?" He got another nod and continued. "This is what I mean by 'developing your sense' for Electro. You've got a sense for things like weight, developed over the course of a lifetime, based on patterns in the data you collected from everything you've ever been able to see and lift. Now you can 'see' in another dimension, basically, and you need to start taking measurements from the beginning."
"What do you mean, 'a sense for weight'?"
"If I asked you to imagine a piece of wood about as thick and as wide as your hand but as long as you are tall, you can roughly envision how much that would weigh, right?" Under the guise of the lesson, the fact that he would eventually shock her again, he didn't let go of her hand. He rubbed circles against her skin and curled his fingers around hers. "Or if I told you a certain stone weighed about as much as a standard bag of rice, you can picture the size of the rock?"
For a second she looked like she was far away, trying to follow his instructions and imagine the weight of the wood, the picture of the rock. Then she nodded again.
"Now stay with me," he said. He grinned and got a little eye roll out of her. "If I pulled a tarp off a mysterious object, you would look at it, take in everything you could about how it looks, make a guess about what kind of material and density it is, and you would have a prediction for how much it weighed. Right? If it looked like cor lapis but cloudier and darker, and it was about as big as a cat, you'd think, okay, that's going to be pretty heavy. You'll probably need to wrap both arms around it to lift it. That sound right?"
She bit her lip. "...I suppose? If I thought it looked like a stone, yeah, I would… I'd be surprised if you could pick it up single-handed. If it really weighed as little as a feather, while looking just like a massive gem, it would be confusing."
It was his turn to nod, and he gave her hand another squeeze. "So that's why I have to shock you. I'll use different amounts, and tell you how much I hit you with, and over time you'll gain your own instincts for what different electric charges feel like. It's actually a much faster process than you're probably expecting."
"How fast?" she asked. "And is this how the Fatui did it? Hand-to-hand?"
"Um."
Fuck, he'd fallen for it again.
Sometimes she seemed to speed through questions and it left him in positions like this, where he said filler words without meaning to, and completely gave away the answer. She narrowed her eyes and he sighed.
At least she didn't remind him that he had promised to be honest. He remembered. He knew the deal.
He was going to tell her even if she hadn't asked, just… Later…
"No, the Fatui…" How to phrase this? Ugh, there really wasn't a delicate way to go about it. "Their way might be a little bit faster because they… I mean, what areas on the body have the most receptors to register Electro? Where are the nerve endings the most densely packed? They're all about efficiency, so they make you develop your sense really fast by hitting somewhere that's… really, really sensitive."
Lumine's eyes went from narrow to wide as the implications slowly dawned on her.
"What? That's what you meant when you said it was part of the training? They literally shock each other, like… Sexually?" She knew even as she was saying it that she should not have been surprised. It felt so obvious now.
Childe huffed out a breath of air so overdramatically that it ruffled his bangs. "Yes. Okay? Yeah." The words seemed to almost force their way out of him. "That's how the Fatui did it. And no one even really considers that they can say 'no' to a commanding officer, because they assume that to do so would be to give up on ever ascending the ranks. That's why I need to be crystal clear that you can say 'no', whenever you want, if you ever want to stop, and you're not going to get in trouble or anything like that. You can say 'no.'"
And there it was again.
On one level, she appreciated that he was being so considerate. He was right, objectively, and it made perfect sense that he would be concerned about coercion and consent after what he'd seen. Yes. Great.
On another level, she wanted to borrow some sound equipment from Xinyan and blast her amplified voice into Childe's face, and say once and for all, "I already agreed to this. Please stop double-checking. If I want to back out, I will. Can we just fuck already and get it over with?"
She was slowly starting to come around to the fact that, "I will not hold it against you if sexual activity unfortunately takes place," was not sufficiently effective as a message.
If she wanted him to get past this hang up, she needed something stronger. Maybe get the sound equipment and scream, "I am actually looking forward to fucking you," in his face?
Alas, she had no microphone nor speaker on hand, so all she said was, "I understand. I promise, I've heard you, I won't forget. We can proceed."
"I was thinking we could experiment with it, actually," he said, and he looked too comfortable with his own words for her to get excited over the idea. "Fingertips have tons of nerve endings, so we can start with just that and see how far we get. Just because the Fatui go all the way, doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. Even if it's a little slower than the original method, it'll overall still probably go much faster than you're expecting it to – and you're under no obligation to take your clothes off to do it."
She didn't want to blush but she couldn't help it. Surely, turning red whenever something sexual came up wasn't helping to inspire any confidence that she could handle this, right? He must see her blush and think she's too innocent, too nervous.
He confirmed her suspicion by squeezing her hand comfortingly. "I promised to fully train you in Electro, and I will uphold that. I'll pinky promise and swear on the ice. All you have to do is sit here, and I'll only shock your hands, and if it seems like it's going too slow or we're hitting a limit to how much we can achieve through fingertips… I'll do some research, okay? I bet I can find–"
"Childe."
The wind appeared to leave his sails.
Lumine breathed deeply.
"You've got to stop acting like you're going to ruin me."