#MY GOD PAIMON THE WOMAN JUST LOST HER TWO MOST TRUSTED RIGHT HANDS

[welcometoteyvat]

NEVER HAVE I FELT MORE ANNOYED AT PAIMONS DIALOGUE

[elleonmybeloved]

Lumine sits at the base of the anemo archon statue, leaning her weight heavily on the cool stone. Two crunchy Mondstadt hash browns and a sunsettia lie on the ground beside her atop a small cloth, but she’s in no state to bring herself to eat just yet.

The flow of healing magic is slow, but dependable, and she knows from experience she won’t have to stay for more than an hour before it heals the wounds on her body. The electro cicin mage had stopped just shy of killing her: She can’t quite see, her fingers involuntarily twitch every few seconds, and there’s a shooting pain that travels from her hip down her left leg. There might be a couple burns here and there too, but her whole body hurts and her vision isn’t healed enough to see them clearly in the steadily dimming light of dusk.

Paimon is absent. Lumine had sent her away. She needed time to think, alone.

Why had the mage spared her? She could think of no shared love between her and the Fatui. Maybe she was imagining it but recently in her encounters with abyss mages, they quickly turned tail and ran away. Ever since... Signora had stolen Venti’s gnosis.

Unable to find a reason for the change, she searched her memories, for what must be the hundredth time.

She and Aether had always traveled from world to world looking for... looking for... something important. Teyvat was dangerous. It didn’t have what they were looking for, so they were leaving. They were passing the... the only beautiful realm, with the clouds, and an unknown god had stepped out of a void of blackness and attacked them with sinister cubes of something that resembled the void the goddess had stepped out of.

Lumine remembers noticing her gaze shift to her and had instively dodged back. Aether had been taken by surprise and engulfed in the cubes. And she’d attacked the goddess with such a ferocity it made a huge explosion, that was engulfed in cubes that surged up her arm. She had used her power to resist as much as she could but it wasn’t enough and she was surrounded by the void as well.

It had taken her a long time to escape. She wasn’t even sure when she’d managed it, because she had used so much power to resist that she had fallen unconscious somewhere along the way. She had awoken powerless, wingless, and alone in a Teyvat that looked nothing like when they first arrived. Of course her first thought had been to search for Aether. But she hadn’t found anything in the area other than slimes, and bipedal beasts that had attacked her on sight.

Paimon says she found her while fishing. Lumine thinks that’s right. Like the monsters, slimes, and ...ghostly cliones, Paimon was the closest thing she had yet to find resembling humanity in the Teyvat she had awoken to. But Paimon is wasn’t human, of course.

And now, she has scoured the face of Mondstadt and Liyue, leaving no cave unexplored, no villager unquestioned, no chest unopened, but somehow there isn’t a single shred of evidence that leads to Aether. She would feel it if he was dead, she’s almost certain. So why hadn’t a soul seen him? Lumine has headaches from the constant use of her elemental sight, hoping to catch a glimpse of the gold she desperately wishes to see again.

Well enough to sit up now, Lumine lifts her meal off the ground and chews monotonously through it.

There’s always been this melody, in the recess of her mind. She’s been trying to remember it, hoping for a clue to break through the amnesia, but only gets snippets at a time, and can’t remember any of the words. Lumine is always quick to sing it when she is alone, unwilling to let it fade from her memory.

In light of finding no answers, maybe working on this will give her enough sense of a victory to hold the encroaching despair at bay. Her fingers are sticky with sunsettia juice as she wipes them on her cloth, and she clears her throat to sing.

The melody is slow in coming, and there are still no words, so she replaces them with an ooh, opening up the sound into an aah when it feels right.

Getting stuck in a few places doesn’t discourage her, and she just starts the part again when it happens. To her surprise, she pushes through into a new part, where the melody swells high and it’s beautiful and eerie, and unmistakably sad. But Lumine is filled with euphoria at the breakthrough and sings louder for once, getting carried away.

Another voice harmonizes with hers in a beautiful duet. Her startled voice falters a little, but she continues, unwilling to squander her newly gained ground against her lost memories. The voice is male, and for a moment her heart does a painful squeeze as hope that it’s Aether soars in her chest. But the hope lasts only for a few seconds, as she listens and hears that the voice is not his. The experience distracts her, and she loses the next part of the song, voice withering out.

Lumine looks around her for the source of the other voice, but the sun has fully set now and despite her restored vision, she can’t see anyone.

“I’m up here.” He calls, and Venti jumps- floats- down from his perch high in the branches of the Symbol of Mondstadts Hero, landing lighter than a feather.

“You? How do you know that song?” She questions in an urgent demand. In the moonlight he looks ethereal, unhuman.

“I was here before you arrived.” He responds defensively in reaction to her tone, but keeps his expression open and inviting as always. “I know I’ve told you I know every song, past, present, or future.”

“I’ve never sang that part before, it’s new even to me.” She refutes. The air is growing tenser.

“... Your voice carries on the wind.” He admits reluctantly. “So I already knew the other parts. It was easy to improvise the new one. Comes naturally to me.” Venti shrugs as if it’s no big deal.

“But I’ve never...” She trails off before saying ‘sang here before’, realizing with great embarrassment that the wind flows everywhere in Mondstadt and there have been several nights she has left Paimon behind to raise her voice in lament to the moon with this melody. “I didn’t realize. You must be accustomed to a lot of noise then.”

“Most of the time I tune it out if it’s not a song.” He admits. “I like to compete with the other bards in the city.”

It sounds to Lumine like an excuse to deflect her attention away from the fact that he has been listening to her voice on the wind with some degree of intentionality.

“Forgive me.” Venti says, “I didn’t want you to have to sing it alone again.”

Lumine’s embarrassed indignation dissipates as she hears what he didn’t say. That she always sounds lonely.

“It’s okay. You’re right. Singing it alone is... it felt better with you.”

Venti surprises her by stepping in close and squeezing her in a hug, just a little too fiercely to be gentle. The way he feels pressed so close against her is like a balm for the ache in her chest and she hugs him back with an almost greedy haste. They are almost the same height, so when he leans back, not breaking the embrace, they are face to face.

He reads the expression there and asks. “What about Paimon? I thought she never leaves your side.”

“I don’t trust Paimon.” It’s the first time she had ever said it aloud, and it feels weird. She doesn’t even know what Paimon is, but for some reason she never thinks of this.

“But you trust me?” He doesn’t say even though he is an archon, but she knows he implies it.

She thinks of how vehemently he fought for Dvalin’s freedom, and what he sacrificed to get his precious friend back. She understands that more than anything. He kept her from plummeting to her death during the storm, and gave her the closest thing to her wings back.

“Yes. I know I don’t want to see...” The sharp gurgled sound of pain he’d made when Signora snatched out his gnosis from within him resonates with the loud crack of the woman’s hand across his face when she had slapped him in her mind. “... Don’t want to see you go through what I did.”

“I’m not powerless. And giving up my gnosis was worth nobody getting hurt.” His blue eyes glow in the night and he presses his cheek to hers with an affectionate nuzzle. “Especially you.”

Lumine processes that for a moment. It’s been so long since she felt so...

Loved.