SI&OC Spring Cleaning: Fragments and WIPs

Kaedehara Kazuha meets the girl he's arranged to marry when he's fifteen years old. His father has found her for him, a smart one one year older from a minor noble clan that's been doing better financially since she officially took her mother's position as the manager of household. Her father is rumored to be a common visitor of the ukiyoe, but his health is declining; if he dies with his daughter still unmarried, she will likely only find work in the lowest of positions.

Kazuha knows himself; he will chafe as the head of a clan, as the husband of a maiden he might like but doesn't love. But does this girl deserve the fate that awaits her when he can do something about it?

Amanagi Sakuya is a tiny slip of a girl, her kimono a simple, well-worn one for casual tea ceremonies rather than the juunihitoe any other noble girl would have been wearing. Kazuha and his own worn formal hakama, repaired over and over thorough the years, has no place to judge that her brown hair is held up with actual wildflowers and wooden hairsticks, not when the haori on his own shoulders has been worn by three separate generations before his own. Though there's a slight medicinal smell hanging around her, her blue eyes are bright and awake, and she's smiling ever so slightly as they sit down, one of their household's keepers just off to the side as chaperones. Kazuha's father is not well enough to supervise, and by what loose mouths are flapping Amanagi's isn't either. Whether the marriage negotiations go better or worse because of this happenstance, remains to be seen.

She's well-versed in tea ceremonies; Kazuha tastes the matcha with some excitement and is pleasantly surprised to find the flavor agrees with him.

"Kaedehara-sama," Amanagi breaks the silence with a bow that Kazuha returns.

"Amanagi-dono," as is proper.

"I do apologize for the informality of the setting, however I feel it would be better if we are direct with each other with regards to what each of us expects of this marriage." Kazuha nods, and the negotiations begin.

.

It's ridiculous to say, but in five short years, the Kaedehara clan has returned to some of its previous glory. They're no longer so severely in debt that they have to sell household objects; a few key investitions have brought them enough money to pay their servants well, and to even fix some of the more dire problems in the manor. Sakuya has truly been a miracle maker as the keeper of the account books, and even Kazuha's father has passed away with his heart light that his son is free from debts. From chains, too - Sakuya had pulled him aside a few months into their cohabitation and suggested a trip or two to the neighboring islands for this and that, and Kazuha had taken the suggestion for some fresh air with badly hidden relief.

It had felt disingenuous to leave his new wife alone in such a time of turmoil in the household, but she had dropped the slight smile she'd been wearing for the whole time he'd known her and told him directly that him buzzing like a bee around the compound helped no one, least of all himself, which was why she was appointing him to do something he could help with. Kazuha had felt even worse that she'd seen through him, and sent back every haiku he remembered to write down while walking through the Chinju Forest.

Now, Kazuha is the Kaedehara clan's head in name only, free to wander as he sees fit as long as he sends something back to show he's still alive once in a while. The Anemo Vision he'd received while slumbering upon a sun-warmed rock in Watatsumi island hangs over his shoulder, watching his back while Kazuha's eyes are focused forward, and the smiles of the house servants that had greeted him at the compound gates, light of burden or worry, are always there for him to return to.

.

Kazuha is twenty-five when the Vision Hunt Decree is announced, the crackle of the Tatarasuna furnace a constant noise in his ears and a lingering wish for the traveling companion who'd left on his own way days ago in his heart. Barely a week passes before he receives a letter, carefully passed on by a street kid he tosses a melon to, the brush strokes familiar.

Wind howls through the cracks/lightning oft strikes at home first/are the cracks big enough?

A poet, Kazuha thinks with some amusement, his wife is not, but the questions she asks are rarely meaningless. The paper he folds and slides into the folds of his clothes, to memorize later, and the information about the Tenryou commission searching for him in his own home as a known Vision wielder and possible exit strategies she knows about he tucks aside for the friends he plans to meet up with. After all, even if Kazuha decides he isn't running away, some of the other Vision bearers he knows might decide differently.

.

There's a dead Vision hanging under his own, hands shaking still from deflecting the Almighty Shogun's All-Cutting Blade, when Sakuya crouches next to him, slight smile as always present on her face.

"What a pleasure to see you alive," she says lightly, offers a shoulder he gratefully leans on to free Gorou from carrying his weight. There's a subtle scent of Electro coming off of her, mixing with the usual faint medicinal one, and when Kazuha perks up in curiosity, she obligingly turns her head so he can see the Vision tucked in the center of the braided bun she's done up.

"Is it new?" Kazuha asks before he remembers he didn't even return her greeting, but Sakuya answers before he can correct himself with a very slight shrug and a casual,

"I've had it since before we met. I just have little use for it most of the time." Kazuha wants to ask why she decided to show Inazuma she possessed one the day the Rabellion was to storm the Tenshukaku, but he supposes the answer is quite self-explanatory.

As is the fact she's carrying a weapon, dressed in armored but easy to move in clothes.

"You have decided to join the Rebellion openly, with no more behind the scenes help?" The contact and information systems she's running are enough work for three people after all, even if one doesn't add the housekeeping of the Kaedehara clan.

The smile on her face doesn't falter. "I've decided I'm not deposing the Almighty Shogun this time."

From anyone else, it would be an ill-timed joke. Kazuha sees a sparkle in her lilac-blue eyes, somehow ice-cold and yet still burning, and isn't entirely sure this is the case for this particular situation.

(Your name is Ralitsa Antonova Shtereva and you are thirty-seven. You have four younger siblings and enough older cousins to fill up three different school classrooms. You have three nieces and five nephews, some of whom are close enough to your age that you go out for drinks together whenever you come back home to visit.

You have a PhD in Linguistics, three apartments in two different continents, and a desire to adopt a cat you will never fulfill because you cannot stand the smell of them. You speak six languages fluently enough to work in a governmental position and ten more well enough to live in the country without much issue. You like fantasy books with a little bit of romance, but your shelves are stacked with classics instead, with linguistic studies and language textbooks and whatever random book you’ve accidentally brought over from one of your other apartments without noticing.

You are the eldest daughter of your parents, the eldest child of your relatives’ generation, and you do not marry. You do not have children.

What were they thinking, naming her after a flower symbolising inconsistency? You can hear the grandmas in your tiny village whisper. She is up in the wind, can’t even decide if she wants to live in Europe or Asia! Too much freedom, that one.

Your mother doesn’t press for children, for marriage. She will not repeat her own mother’s mistakes. But she does hold your eyes, and she does ask, Are you happy? Rale, you have done so much with your life - are you happy?

You don’t know. You have never been interested in people - you do not crave romance; you do not wish for children. You have friends all around the world, but amongst their own family and partners, they will never place you first. You will never place them first, either.

You do not say you are lonely; you don’t know how to open up to people, and you are old enough, now, not to have to cry in your mother’s lap. You say, instead, is there anything I shouldn’t be happy with?

It is answer enough; you and your mother are too different to see eye-to-eye on some parts of the world, but mostly you are too similar for comfort. It’s just that - she found somebody who made her want to open up, no matter how much it hurt. And you - did you not find such a person? Or did you not search one out in the first place?

Can it not be both? You want to ask her. She is your mother, and there is a small part of you that wants to curl up in her arms and cry. Mom, nobody wants to play with me. You are too similar, so you know what she will answer: they will when you stop being afraid to play with them. She speaks from experience, so she is right; but you also speak from experience, so can you not also be right?

You die with regrets, of course you do: your personal student was days away from defending her doctorate thesis; one of your nephews was graduating high school soon; your youngest sister’s wedding was in three months; your brother’s first child was due by the end of the year.

You wake up, surprised, of course - but somewhat sluggish. There’s a face above yours; babies’ eyes are not good enough to see the face of what you presume to be the woman who gave birth to you. (She has not raised you, has not shaped you - so you will not call her ‘mother’ until she earns that title.)

It is quickly apparent you were born in a Red-Light District; you are not thrown out or drowned, but by the terrified slant of your carrier’s mouth whenever she looks at you it’s not out of goodwill.

…You’ve been born with birth defects - a tail-like appendage you can barely feel, ugly enough to make rumours spread about a curse, and three purple whisker-like things growing from the top of your head, sensitive to all vibrations in the air, as well as - magnetising currents?

You have not yet had your first shichi-go-san when a muted gathering of lightning visits; you know he is your sire. He takes you with a gleeful smile and a thrown-over-his-shoulder comment about visiting again to see if the next one’s results would be this perfect, and the woman who gave birth to you is trembling in terror.

…They look alike, your sires. Feel alike, as well. There is a surety in your bones that confirms it without you having to ask, wanting to ask: he is her father. Cousin. Uncle.

The next few years confirm your thoughts: you are in Inazuma, a world based on that Genshin Impact game that had no ending yet, and you were born a descendant of the Electro Dragon Sovereign. Your clan’s whole mission is to birth a new dragon to restore their glory… by any means necessary.

You grow up; your sire visits your bed often enough, and you think: I am an adult. Better me than a clueless child. But you still plan to get rid of him. You will not be a breeding horse for this diminished, pathetic man.

Your father has been sick for a while - most of it is the numerous STDs he’s getting, sowing his repugnant seed all over the Red Light District, but some of it is the genetic inconsistencies that often come with incest. You help him along, of course, with poison and Electro applied directly to his nervous system - but you know. You will not live long, either.

It is cruel, and perhaps unnecessary for one of your favourite Genshin characters - but you have never been called a good person before. You get your reputation as an immaculate accountant, and you send the Kaedehara Clan a marriage offer they cannot afford to refuse.

You are wed quickly; Kaedehara Kazuha is noble, and he knows what will happen to you after your father’s death. The mourning period is barely over when you move into their old home, and Kazuha looks like he is ashamed of what his clan shows you - not because he’s ashamed of them, but rather of himself.

Well, he’s done you such a good favour already, saving you from an even shorter life in the Red Lights’ District - you raise his clan back up in a couple of years, bring his dying father a measure of comfort as he passes away. Let him roam with no issues, as long as he contacts you once or twice per year.

The Vision Hunt Decree begins. You’ve spent years trying to get Inazuma back on its feet after 500 years of hands-off ruling; your workload triples overnight. You get an Electro Vision to explain away the elemental beast snuggled under your feet, and get to work.)

(Or: ‘you’ are in pieces, slumbering underneath the roots of the World Tree. Fractured, leaving mirror-shades and tiny sliver-shards of your former power scattered around th Nether, too weak to do more than note their rough location for a nebulous future, what-if, in which you will be able to somehow reabsorb them and become whole once again.

The black liquid dripping over some of your remains is corrosive, tastes of burning-cold hatred and terror and death the likes of which only mortals are supposed to know. Maybe it takes seconds, maybe millennia, but you watch and you see and you learn - the countries the Usurpers have built on what was once your land, the languages they speak, the tools they use; the muddy, heavy sludge of knowledge-that-shouldn’t-be, words that sound similar to the ones the Usurpers use but not quite, the science to dissect them, the knowledge to craft new ones. That’s a kind of power ‘you’ haven’t known before, something maybe even The King Himself would be interested in. The parts of ‘you’ that are strongest suck the corrupted memories into themselves, ready to deal with the acidic burn as they assimilate into a useful storage of knowledge.

Hello, You-Who-intends-To-Devour-Me-Whole. The Corrupted Files speak to ‘you’. Are these all of the memories You-Who-Is-Not-Whole plans to save from This-Flower-Of-Indecisiveness?

The pieces of ‘you’ are small enough to be unable to vocalise; but This-Flower-Of-Indecisiveness is -somehow- already deep into what is left of ‘you’.

I see, The Corrupted Files say. What are corrupted files, ‘you’ want to ask. Files aren’t supposed to speak, and they’re not supposed to be opened, either. We could have come to an Accord, Shattered-Lightning-Of-Old, if you had agreed to carry the memories of those I hold dear. But since you won’t…

It seems it will be me who will be carrying what is left of ‘you’ instead.)

A certain wanderer, to a certain reincarnation:

“You know this will end badly.”

“Do I? Is it written in the stars? Is your former boss not about to destroy the world in order to deny fate? But even if you are correct…

“It might be an inherently mortal view, but I personally believe tragedy would not exist without happiness; without something worthy to lose. And if fate has already decreed that I will lose it all, then I will just have to make sure I have as much as I can before that point.”

How A Certain Proposal Could Have Gone:

“Marry me!” The boy excitedly says. Sakuya blinks slowly, calms her heart down.

“…May I think about it?”

…

“I don’t think it’s the best idea, especially considering the circumstances. Marriage, even if it doesn’t include love, is built up on trust, and such a thing will be difficult to acquire in our relationship due to our political positions. Furthermore, I know you’re Orthodox, and I’m concerned some parts of my past I’d rather not share might run counter to your permitted relationships.”

“Oh? Can you give me an example?”

“Give me a moment; I don’t know how to word in a way that will not pose a risk to my privacy.”

“Ahaha, you truly think me unloyal huh!”

“…on the contrary, I find your loyalty admirable. It’s why I’m trying to make this as uncomplicated as it can be - because I know your loyatly to your God is unbreakable, and if you had somethng to help her, you would share. I’m trying to avoid making you feel bad for being loyal.”

A certain conversation:

“…You,” his smile is slow and smug to spill over his pale face, “threw me off a cliff because I was flirting with you and it was working?”

“Would you like to repeat the experience,” Sakuya deadpans. Tartaglia beams.

A certain relationship reveal:

“We’re married!”

The boy who was once a man called Tartaglia is in Inazuma once again; he passes through the gorge in the island every day, and then he sees her - a small shape swimming relaxedly in the balethunder.

“Guess what!” Tartaglia’s beaming. Katya grins.

“Has Master Childe married?” The funeral consultant in the background looks incredibly proud for some reason; the adepti shift restlessly, and Ganyu goes red. The Fair Lady scoffs and looks away, face twisted in disdain, but next to her Lady Ningguang taps her closed fan to her lips, seeming deep in thought.

“Yes! Today was the last day required of The Silence! Now I can officially talk your ears off about—”

“Sorry, did we manage to make it in time?” A rough, cheery voice cuts in - Captain Beidou and some of her crew walk in, followed by who Kateryna figures must be the Inazuman dignitaries the Tianquan was supposed to be meeting today. Master Childe’s gasp is audible; he’s off like a shot with a laugh she can honestly say she’s never expected to hear out of him outside of combat.

“You’re here!” He exclaims. coming to a stop before a young man dressed in reds and browns and his companion, herself clad in a light yellow-and-purple formal kimono with a wine-red, almost purple obi that compliments her companion’s colour scheme. An interesting choice, because as far as Kateryna remembers from her basic culture training, wearing so much purple at once signaled something - it’s just that she cannot remember what, and suddenly it’s imperative she knows.

“We meet again, Tartaglia,” the male bows lightly; the woman covers her mouth with a sleeve-covered hand, but doesn’t manage to utter anything before Master Childe grabs her by the waist and spins her around like they’re the protagonists of an adolescent romance novel from Fontaine with a delighted whoop.

“Well met to His Imperial Highness as well,” she dryly greets once she’s let down on the ground - gently, like she’s something rare and precious, the exact same way Katya’s seen her superior handle his younger brothers. The words are spoken in Common, but the title is in High Snezhnayan and only the slightest bit accented. Oh, Katya thinks, and the smile is spilling over her face before she can stop it.

“Your Imperial Highness!” Vlad exclaims from the sidelines, all but vibrating with excitement, “is that-?”

“Yes!” Master Childe offers the lady his elbow - the angle of it polished to perfection, but the motion still eager and bouncy - and spins around to face the Tianquan and the others. “This is Her Emminence Amanagi Sakuya of the Kaedehara Clan, and as of today she’s my wife!”

Andrei comes from a decently large town in the south, nothing compared to the truly tiny northern settlement Master Childe hails from; Vlad is from the Capital, and Nadya’s from the relatively non-traditionalist West, where The Silence isn’t observed; still, all of them cheer as one, loud whoops and shrill whistles (and a relatively painless miming of spitting three times into the ground to protect against jinxes, courtesy of Katya herself, whose North-born-and-raised grandma would string her up by her own guts if she heard nobody else did it during a marriage announcement) that drown out the puzzled exclamations of the non-Snezhnayans around them.

“How did you meet?” Yuliya Snezhnevna asks immediately, eyes sparkling; the other Snezhnayans quiet down immediately, ears perking up.

“He walked on me bathing,” Amanagi Sakuya says blandly.

“Hey!” Master Childe protests over the choking noises around him, “Don’t make it sound like I was breaking into your house! You were the one bathing in a river outside in the middle of winter!”

“But you did break into my house,” she refutes. “The river I was in is in my backyard, obviously I’m allowed to do whatever I please in my own backyard?“

”And I didn’t know it was your backyard because you don’t have any fences! It’s not like you put up a barrier at the end of your property, did you?”

“But there are fences, and I know that because I watched you jump over them with full audacity—”

“—and maybe if you want them to count as fences, you should repair them so they don’t look like every other abandoned building in Inazuma—”

“—well excuse me Mr. The Cryo Archon adopted me and is financing my ridiculous lifestyle, but we are not all, in fact, kin of our own country rulers—”

“Is that why you’re married?” Secretary Ganyu cuts in; she looks lost and a little overwhelmed. “Because Master Childe saw, um…”

“Oh! No, not really. There’s no such rule in Inazuma, right?”

“I can request reparations to regain any lost honour, but there’s a reason why marriage is excluded from that,” Her Emminence adds with a slight tilt to her head that should read as puzzled, but Katya somehow interprets as threat. “Maybe if it was the other way around…?” She looks up at Master Childe, who makes a so-so motion with his free hand.

“It depends, really. If it could work out as a marriage, then maybe… But most of the time all it gets you is a well-deserved beating and some sanctions. Like, no wearing jewellery for this amount of time, no eating meat until the next solstice, and so on.”

“It falls a little too close for comfort to the old stories about fae being tricked into marriage, yeah.” Katya feels compelled to add in light of the sea of confused faces in front of her. She shouldn’t be surprised, really - most of the deeper cultural practices in the deep recesses of the tundra are rarely shared with outsiders.

“Then, um… the reason would be?” The secretary looks almost pained when she asks the leading question; Katya doesn’t know if she should applaud her for figuring out how the whole Announcement thing functions this quickly, or be suspicious of her motivations. After all, there did seem to be a whole lot of preposterous rumours about Master Childe being engaged to Rex Lapis himself the last couple of months - something any Snezhnayan would ignore just on the basis of how open the information seemed to be; but Ganyu is an adeptus, and she could possibly have some concerns about her erstwhile Lord.

“Ah, well!” Something mischeivous sparks in her superior’s dead eyes; next to him, his wife shrinks and hides her face in her sleeves. “That would be because she hurled a boulder at me for it!”

“A rock,” Amanagi-dono insists over Captain Beidou’s surprised guwaffs and her companion’s snickering; all three of Lady Ningguang’s secretaries are in various stages of ungraceful gaping. “It wasn’t a boulder, it was a rock, because I picked it up with one hand so it wasn’t nearly as large as what you’re implying, and I did not throw the rock at you, I threw it at the poor hilichurl you were too busy chasing like a cat in heat through my garden. You just got in the way!”

“See, I would believe you if I hadn’t seen you nail lavender melons off treebranches at easily thrice that distance; also, you managed to hit me - not the hilichurl twenty meters ahead of me - straight in the head way too well for someone who wasn’t even supposed to know I was there, since I had my Agent uniform on and was invisible at the time!”

“Maybe I didn’t need to see you standing there to hear all the racket you were making across my flowers, have you thought of that?”

“And so we come back to you purposefully hitting me in the head with your boulder-sized rock—”

“I hit him hard enough to disable the whole invisibility thing,” Amanagi-dono turns to Katya to explain, exasperated, “and he, in his infinite sixteen-year-old wisdom, decided I somehow did it on purpose—”

“—you did, I have never once in my life seen an Agent’s cloaking devide being disabled with one hit, let alone one not infused with Elemental energy—”

(”He’s right, that is a little weird,” Vlad muses quietly, hissing when Nadya elbows him to stay quiet.)

“—and so, here I am, naked as one should be during an onsen visit, with this- this little Fatui manchild groaning on the ground—”

“—It was a really good hit, it almost knocked me out!—”

“—and since of course he falls right next to my clothes, he sees my Vision on top of them and goes—”

“—hey, I didn’t need to see your Vision to know you had one, the whole river was crackling with Electro—”

“—and so this utter disgrace of a being looks up at me through his lashes like he’s about to charm his way out of this situation, and he goes, ‘hey, if I say I was deliberately spying on you bathing, will you fight me?’”

Something bubbles up in Katya’s throat, like a hiccup but a thousand ways worse. She swallows a few times in an effort to keep the inappropriate laughter down, but evidently she’s one of the few who succeed - Lady Ningguang’s lips are twitching behind her fan, and Captain Beidou’s first mate is wheezing so hard he needs to be held up straight. Yuliya has cupped her hands over her mouth, eyes wide, but her shoulders are shaking.

The Fair Lady’s expression is truly ugly; there’s an enraged kind of violence in it that makes Katya stand at attention, and she resolves to prepare for the blowback that will come sooner or later. Mister Zhongli’s face is a lot harder to read - it simultaneously looks as though it’s carved out of stone and glass that will shatter at any moment.

“Anyway, so obviously Sakuya denied me a fight, called me pathetic for not catching one measly hilichurl, and then made me reimburse her for tresspassing on the down-low rather than report me to the Tenryou Commission, which I am obviously grateful for—”

“—and to show me how grateful he is, he decided to bother me for a fight every time he was in Inazuma—”

“—and in the end you agreed! And then after that fight, I asked her to marry me, because I wanted to fight her again! And she said yes!”

Vlad coughs in his fist, visibly collects himself. ”A little counterproductive to ask her to marry you just for fighting when you weren’t allowed to see each other for— have we been in Liyue for a year already?”

“Oh!” Tartaglia grins. “No, it’ll be one year in two weeks, but we haven’t seen each in three years!”

Katya’s mouth falls open despite all of her training. Andrei’s eyes are so wide it looks like they’ll pop out of his skull. “Th-Three years?!” Yuliya gasps out. “That’s—”

“A farce,” The Fair Lady sneers from the side. Her eyes are alight with madness. “Peasants playing pretend at aristocracy.”

“That’s… incredibly Orthodox.” Katya allows herself to comment. Master Childe shrugs.

“My family’s traditionalist, you know. Also, it was Her Imperial Majesty’s directive, as well - we needed to see if we could function as a pair despite our differing loyalties.” Now that’s something interesting - Katya’s not all that familiar with Inazuma’s government, but Amanagi-dono must be a crucial part of it, if the full three years of Silence were required.

“Forgive me for interrupting, but it seems as though… there’s some cultural context missing?” Ganyu quietly questions, and all Snezhnayans are suddenly the center of attention.

“Ah, well… I guess we do have to commit our duty as diplomats at least once,” Master Childe jokes lightly. “Hmm, let me ask you first - what do you know about wedding traditions in Snezhnaya?”

“Other than their presumed existence, not much, I’m afraid,” Lady Ningguang answers readily. One of her secretaries has pulled out a binder, ready to commit any information to paper.

“That’s fair! Well, influenced by a few myths and legends I won’t waste your time going into, there’s this traditional part of the engagement called ‘The Silence’ - it’s a time where the engaged parties are forbidden from facilitating any sort of contact with each other, and it’s supposed to be a sort of test - of persistence, loyalty, perseverence, survival, duty and so on. Depending on one’s family station and their relationships and reputation, how long it lasts varies from three days to three years - most people who do it at all nowadays opt for the shortest possible time, but there’s always exceptions - pastors do three months to prove their faith and dedication to Her Imperial Highness, and since I’m a Harbinger, I did the whole three years.”

“It’s a common trope in legends about forbidden love, mostly between a mortal and a fae,” Yuliya adds, looking a little surprised at herself. “Three years for a human is a relatively long time, and an incredibly short one for a fae - so spending time apart tests whether their love will last until its natural conclusion or wither away into nothing. Additionally, it can also be a test of duty and loyalty of a ruling body - without contact during war, you need to trust the other person to survive without you helping them and selling your own side out, and then be able to put your differences aside once you meet again and not use the relationship as a political tool.” Not that it works most of the time in real life, but…

“Traditionally, at least in the North, it’s also done in secret,” Katya jumps in. “It’s not really supposed to be…obvious? That the engaged parties are going through The Silence. If their engagement is discovered, it’s said to bring bad luck; some of the more superstituous relatives might even annul the wedding in the past.”

“Hm, but if you go from hanging out every day with someone to suddenly ignoring them, won’t it be obvious what’s happening anyways? Or get confused with you guys breaking up?”

“Obviously, it depends, but at least where I’m from - you don’t really do dating? Since everybody knows everybody, you just talk it over with your families if you want to get married down the line, and they permit you to start The Silence together. In really small villages, avoiding each other is impossible, so you… pretend? I guess? Don’t have any meaningful conversations, keep it to neutral topics? It's a lot easier to keep to it if you have different jobs for example, because it used to be for declaring your heart unwavering but sense of duty unshakeable. And if your heart wavers before the end of the time period, then you don’t get married.” Tartaglia shrugs at them. “I mean, most of the time it’s at least a little obvious anyways, but as long as you’re not blatantly doing married-person-things in front of other people before getting married, the polite thing to do is just pretend you don’t see anything and then act surprised when they announce the marriage at the end. It’s bad luck to speak of happiness before it happens, so there’s only a couple of shitheads trying to bet on who’s going to marry who, and beating them up is always allowed.”

“…Fascinating,” Mister Zhongli mutters, and Katya almost startles; she’d forgotten he was there at all. “So it can be said that this Silence is an equivalent to both dating, courting and engagement… Which implies exclusivity?”

Tartaglia smiles, but it’s visible he’s bristling. “Yes, it does. Honestly speaking, I’m so relieved to finally be able to refute all of those baseless rumours about me and Rex Lapis; the last few months were definitely something, what with all sorts of adepti coming up to me in all manners of hours and places and threatening me and my livelyhood for someone I have never seen in a romantic light - hopefully, Miss Ganyu will be able to explain the actual situation and I’ll have my peace and quiet back.”

“You, peace and quiet?” Amanagi-dono smiles up at Master Childe. He laughs, rueful.

“On behalf of the adepti. I give you our most sincere apologies for the misunderstanding,” Miss Ganyu starts, a little flustered. “We were lead to believe you accepted an engagement gift from Lord Rex, and proceeded without clarifying the matter suitably.”

“I haven’t been informed any gift I’ve received was supposed to be anything but a warm welcome to your country,” Tartaglia shrugs, “so if you can excuse my rudeness, I confess I might have indeed gotten something with more significance than I managed to discern. That being said, I personally refuse to see any gift as a proof of any sort of relationship if it’s not also accompanied by a discussion about it, so: even if I’ve unconsciously accepted some kind of proposal, as I wasn’t consciously aware of it, I think of it as null and void.”

“A contract formed when one side is unaware of it is no contract at all,” Amanagi-dono continues softly, smiling eyes locking with Mister Zhongli’s for a few seconds of truly intense contact before he looks down and away.

I wonder what that incredibly not on-the-nose conversation was all about, Kateryna firmly thinks to herself and wraps the thick quilt of oblivion tighter around herself. There are no Geo Archons futilely trying to trick young Harbingers into marriages and making sad eyes when they fail like out of her grandma’s stories, nor are there any possessive most-likely-fae-adjacent maidens promising both political and physical violence for said Archons doing so, no siree.

A certain incredibly messsy outline/timeline constructed mostly by vibes and Hoyo-OSTs:

Amanagi - 天凪 - the calm (at sea) and heaven, aka ‘pls calm down and don’t kill us o dragon sovereign’ 咲弥 Sakuya ‘to blossom all the more’; ‘to finally reveal’

TIMELINE:

FIRST LIFE: 

• At Red Light District until ¬5yo, scent gives away there’s a lot of her inbred relatives around
• tastebuds aren’t the same!!!! she likes fish but can’t stand dairy products now, rip my slavic bae
• at 12 finds Fatui-docs in dad’s room (dottore-deal to strengthen sovereign-dna) and expediates the whole patricide situation w/ homemade poisons, 
• soft-pressures Kaedehara clan to marry her and Kazuha at 16/15 respectively; Rashoumon is the sovereign dragon power spearated from her (not wholly; she fed it her negative emotions first, then later felt bad and wanted to give it a taste of happiness too; they merge together during war later), pretends to have a vision
• uses a whip, manipulating magnetic forces w electro; whip made out of tiny flexible needles for maximum pain (torture?)
• at 16-18 Childe meets her bathing in the electro water gorge, challenges her to a duel she refuses; 
• by 20 she has brought back K clan’s respectability, left Kazuha to do as he pleases (requests he not sleep w/ anyone of the Narukami RLD but doesn’t tell him why; he figures out eventually it’s coz she has relatives there becoz smell);
• has a non-functioning, weirdly-shaped tail (lion/dragon horrid ugly mix); back and arm fins ala kokomi’s dress she cuts off; the three antennae thingies on her head she braids into her hair even tho it hurts; gradual progress from light blue-gray eyes to vibrantly red-violet-blue (opposite way of neuvilette)
• at some point: lynette sent to steal smthn, saku only lets her get away alive bcoz fave chara but leaves a scar; later she smiles at lyney and tells him to say hi to his sis
• 24 - she and Childe are engaged to be married (politics or lost a bet? sad kazu’s not here?), he’s in Liyue; Saku and Scara play 5d chess saving/destroying Inazuma, koko & ayato bg deals, saku despises yae miko, has a firenemy RS w Heizou; finds abt health complications (incest, stds, forbidden knowledge cocktail) too late
• saku goes to speak w electro archon more than once, personally pissed somebody who doesn’t care abt responsibility is ruling her country shittily, tells puppet to tell beelzebul if she doesn’t gather her shit together, saku will break said puppet and throw the damn sword into the sea and usurp the rightfully hers position of power; later on scara finds out, says if saku speaks to his sister like that again, he’ll murder her, she says fair and apologizes to raiden shogun
• 24-25 the Sakoku Decree & Traveler/Aether (first year; Childe turns 25 on July 20th)
• Childe meets up w/ her during his chase of Scara; heavily implied they got married there (diplomatic immunity?)
• 20th July - Childe turns 26 (during Sumeru)
• Spring (Kazu will turn 26 in October) - Kazuha meets Wanderer, romanceeee
• Summer - Kazu gets a visitor from Saku; legal marriage shenanigans? for later: wanderer needs to be married to both kazu and saku for it to be a legit thing; she does the paperwork except their signatures, makes sure they will find it later, so that wanderer knows kaedehara estate is also his forever; trained a replacement for herself
• 20th July - Fontaine, Childe turns 27
• yae miko finds abt saku illnesses, months later - books w same premise (romantic tragedy); yae miko makes fun of RLD, saku skins her, bleaches her fur to white and makes every worker in RLD a thing of fur to keep with them out of spite
• somewhen: taru gets told by saku that once upon a dream her name used to mean a flower symoblising inconsistency; there’s a similar plant in teyvat she shows him, but no translation
• Tsaritsa finds out abt Linguistics forbidden kn (via taru); faerie rules abt names (saku’s irl name has no translation in teyvat, the plant doesn’t exist/isn’t the same, so binding/control only halfway-works) saku native language cracks the dimension? black corrosive blood, body horror, melting 
• War with Celestia: Saku reveals electro sovereign (summoning rest of sovereign power/body from the leylines/abyss to combine w her, almost gets herself overwritten by corruption/previous electro archon), fights with taru who goes mad w abyss power n aims for teucer (greek ajax parallel), double death?
• incredibly cool visual i had of nahida growing a wholeass forest to protect civillians, with wanderer unlocking the electro programming in him to make the trees grow faster (bamf!lodish!!!)
• Kazuha survives, goes home to find out saku knew she was dying anyways but didn’t tell, prepared the household so he’s free for life; wanderer is alive w him too? he and nahida rule sumeru; raiden shogun name tsurara gets a cryo vision somewhere during the war, cuts her hair into a bob and fucks off to travel somewhere, she and eula (if she survives - limb loss?) are p good friends. albedo and she have some sort of RS. nobody knows if they hate eo or are besties but scara thinks it’s hilarious

SECOND LIFE

• saku/kazu/taru/scara/tsu go back at the same time; kazu races to saku’s house, walks in on her n dad, almost murders him before saku says no, not w sword too messy, she kills w electro shock; kazu (13-14) brings saku back to his house, says he’s in love w her and wants them to marry, saku becomes kaedehara accountant earlier; kazu/saku qpr ftw; also saku goes to the doctor immediately, no longer has as many health issues
• scara skedaddles from the fatui (doesn’t kill dottore but close; deal w tsaritsa?), goes to free nahida; it’s a multi-year political mess on the level of scara’s inazuma-destroying sakoku degree, alhaitham might or might not get merged w al-ahmar; scara-nahi-hai holy trinity of sumeru rulers. somehow.
• tsurara says ‘fuck mommy issues’, leaves the musou no hitotachi, skirts around yae miko to bring some order into the country, works secretly w saku (who knows abt fatui involvement from earlier) to stabilise country, then five-six yrs later when scara and sumeru are stable invites him and nahida and they both disown ei, which causes makoto to come out and do the whole seed explanation; in the end ei says sorry, the kids do NOT accept apology, makoto says since twins, she can be their mom if they need or aunt, then disappears. tsurara gives yae miko the sword, tells her rudely to go fuck her estranged gf without fucking up a wholeass country, gets her cryo vision back and goes to join beidou’s crew for a while alongside kazuha. ayato and ayaka are witnesses of this, somehow.
• taru has already joined the fatui, but he goes to inazuma on assignment to find saku, sees her in gorge again, first words are ‘let’s get married!’ (again? legit? the other one was fake/diplomatic issue fix?) saku says okay
• kazu/saku/taru/scara wedding (noble clans in inazuma can have more than one spouse; as highest-ranking, saku is the one marrying all of them/they’re marrying her in order for inheritance/entry into family registry even tho she’s married into the kaedehara clan. how does this foursome work you ask. incredibly. romantic-qpr distinction is so fucking overrated.)
• the canon plot finally begins and SURPRISE MF THE TRAVELER IS LUMINE THIS TIME. thought it’d be a normal time travel bs, didn’t you. nope, it’s a teyvat time loop theory kind of bs instead!
• fontaine ball because of focalors/furina shenanigans; taru/kazu mad saku used to cut off her fins, orders her a dress (chiori) to match her fins and they dance