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Zhongli, once the Geo Archon, now the most reluctantly employed consultant in all of Liyue, found himself staring death in the face.
Death, in this instance, wore red and black and a grin like a coffin lid slamming shut.
It began, as all crimes do, with a funeral director and a fruit basket.
Hu Tao, sprite of mischief and menace incarnate, had taken it upon herself to "rescue" Zhongli from a fate worse than death—perpetual bachelorhood. And she had a plan. A horrible, audacious, flower-scented plan. Which Zhongli discovered when he walked into the Wangsheng Parlor lounge and tripped over a shrine of love letters.
Literal shrine. Incense. Candles. A taxidermy pigeon in a veil.
“Ah, good morning, Mr. Zhongli~” she sings, appearing in the parlor like a cursed lullaby. “Have you heard of this lovely new Liyue tradition? It’s called romantic fulfillment before inevitable death.”
“I believe you made that up just now,” Zhongli replies, already halfway to the balcony, calculating whether he can escape by climbing down the side of the building without shattering every joint in his millennia-old knees.
“Even if I did,” Hu Tao chirps, “that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“Is this about the matchmaking banquet again?”
“No,” she says. Then adds, “Yes. But this time I brought props!”
She flourishes the clipboard like a talisman. It is, in fact, worse than a talisman. It is color-coded.
“Zhongli,” Hu Tao says sweetly, “you’re single.”
“And that,” she continues, “is tragic.”
She says it with the gravitas of a divine verdict. Like the stars are weeping at his singleness. Like the oceans mourning his cold bed.
Zhongli blinks. “I… was unaware it was a source of national tragedy.”
“Tragic and inefficient,” she presses, chin in hands, kicking her legs like a schoolgirl with a clipboard of doomed suitors. “How am I supposed to market us as a family business if my second-in-command doesn’t have a romantic arc?”
“I believe that would be falsifying our branding, not enhancing it.”
“You’re ruining my narrative.”
Zhongli, ever the diplomat, places his cup down and folds his hands. “I do not believe my romantic status requires narrative coherence.”
“So,” Hu Tao purrs, dangling upside-down from the rafters of Wangsheng like an unusually morbid fruit bat, “what do you think of this one?”
Zhongli peers at the top name in horror. “You signed me up to go on a date with—”
“Lady Jingjing from the apothecary. Lovely woman. Only poisoned two of her exes. But that was, like, a year ago, and she’s very spiritual now.”
“I am going to respectfully hurl myself into the sea.”
Hu Tao beams. “And leave poor Lady Jingjing waiting? That’s just rude.”
---
In the end, Zhongli’s downfall comes from one (1) polite, ill-advised lie:
“I’m already seeing someone.”
He says it in a moment of sheer panic, hands trembling under the weight of the clipboard, tea untouched, the ghost of Lady Jingjing's résumé haunting him from Hu Tao’s sleeve.
“Oh?” she says, eyes sparkling like she’s just spotted the Grim Reaper on her lawn and offered him mooncakes. “And who might that be?”
Zhongli doesn’t mean to say Childe.
It’s just that—he’s loud. He’s distracting. He’s… conveniently walking past the parlor at that exact moment, shirt halfway unbuttoned and muttering something in Snezhnayan about contracts being sexy.
Zhongli’s mouth moves before his brain catches up.
“Him.”
Childe blinks. “Me?”
“Yes.”
He turns, grins like a man born for chaos, and says: “Well, well, finally.”
“I don’t believe you,” Hu Tao says, squinting.
“We are dating,” Zhongli says.
“Prove it.”
“Must I?”
“Yes.”
Zhongli raises an eyebrow. “How juvenile.”
Childe leans in.
Zhongli does not move.
They kiss.
It's supposed to be quick. It's not. It's slow and breathless and—what's the word? Reverent. Like a hymn. Like a contract sealed not in ink, but in heat and hesitation.
Hu Tao watches in horror.
“Okay, okay, gods, I get it, I’ll stop matchmaking you!”
They keep kissing.
She throws a bao bun at them.
They do not stop.
Zhongli’s hand is in Childe’s hair. Childe is grinning like a lunatic.
When they part, the room is silent.
Zhongli clears his throat. “I believe the terms of our contract have been met.”
Childe is still smiling like he’s won the war. “Can I kiss you again? For the contract.”
Zhongli blinks. “...Twice. For good measure.”
---
“Let me get this straight,” Childe says later, lying upside down on Zhongli’s couch, legs over the backrest like an overgrown cat.
“I will allow it,” Zhongli says without looking up from his tea.
“You want to pretend to date me?” Childe says, eyes wide. “Like, pretend pretend? As in, hold hands and flirt in front of your boss until she stops trying to hook you up with undead calligraphers and sad wine aunties?”
“Precisely,” Zhongli replies, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve like he isn't making a pact with a walking war crime.
Childe stares. “I accept.”
“You don’t need time to consider it?”
“I’ve been preparing for this role my whole life.”
“You have?”
“Yes,” Childe says solemnly. “I have flirted with you during five separate assassination attempts. I have followed you through tea shops, graveyards, underground fight rings, and that one very suspicious dumpling cart. I have described your voice as ‘chiseled honey dripped over sin.’”
Zhongli raises an eyebrow.
“You remember that?” Childe says, flushing. “I thought you didn’t hear me.”
“I heard you,” Zhongli says dryly. “I merely chose to pretend I didn’t.”
“You’re telling me I could’ve had you this whole time if I just claimed it was for a bet?”
“Apparently.”
Childe grins.
“You’re pretending to date me so Hu Tao stops setting you up.”
“Correct.”
“And you want us to be convincing.”
“Naturally.”
“And convincing includes cuddling?”
Zhongli pauses. Sighs. “Childe—”
Childe beams. “Say no more.”
Ten seconds later he's around Zhongli like a blanket woven from chaotic bisexual energy.
Zhongli’s posture remains straight. Regal. Suffering. “You are rather tactile.”
“You are rather hot,” Childe says, face in his shoulder. “Have you always smelled like incense and wet stone?”
“Have you always been incapable of shutting up?”
“I’m enchanted by your grumpiness. Makes me want to bite your collarbone.”
Zhongli does not respond.
(He does not move either.)
(He definitely does not admit, even internally, that the image is compelling.)
“Ground rules,” Zhongli says solemnly instead.
“No kissing in public,” he continues. “No gratuitous pet names. No hands where they don’t belong.”
Childe’s hand is already on Zhongli’s knee. Zhongli glares.
Childe removes it. Slowly. Like it pains him.
“What do I get in return?” Childe asks.
“My eternal gratitude.”
“I want more than that.”
Zhongli narrows his eyes. “What precisely are you implying?”
“I want dinner.”
“You always want dinner.”
“With you. Every night.”
“That is—”
“And you have to call me darling at least once.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay, then ‘my dearest harbinger of destruction.’”
Zhongli sighs the sigh of one who has known true war.
Childe beams like he’s won it.
---
It turns out, pretending to be in love is not as easy as Zhongli expected. Especially when your fake boyfriend insists on giving dramatic monologues about your bone structure.
“His jawline,” Childe is saying loudly to the tea house waiter, “could chisel through Morax’s own stone tablets. Don’t even get me started on the voice. You heard the man order oolong. My spine straightened. My credit score went up. My vision cleared.”
Zhongli, sipping his tea with all the grace of a man internally screaming, says mildly, “You flatter me.”
Childe turns to him, earnest and annoyingly radiant. “I would die for you.”
“You’ve said that four times this dinner.”
“And I’ll say it four more. I would die for you. There. Six.”
Zhongli’s eye twitches. “You’re holding my hand.”
“Oh, sorry.” Childe squeezes. “Force of habit. Since I’m, you know, in love with you. Platonically. Erotically. Spiritually. In an enemies-to-lovers way. And now also legally, because I told the waiter we’re engaged.”
Zhongli exhales through his nose. “Why.”
“Free dessert.”
Zhongli hates that he respects the efficiency of that logic.
The waiter brings them a cake shaped like a heart. Childe feeds him a bite with a fork. Zhongli accepts it like a man accepting the blade of an executioner.
It tastes like strawberries and shame.
---
By the third day of their arrangement, Zhongli has developed three new migraines, several stomachaches, and the inexplicable desire to either murder or marry his fake boyfriend.
Childe is taking it seriously. That’s the problem.
He’s holding doors. Bringing flowers. Flexing his biceps every time he hands Zhongli a cup of tea.
“Oh, love of my life,” he declares theatrically at the market, draping himself over Zhongli’s shoulder like a drunken scarf. “Would you like some grilled tigerfish? Or are you still on that diet of ancient moral superiority and extremely tight pants?”
The florist giggles. Zhongli contemplates swallowing an entire gemstone.
“Childe,” he hisses, later, dragging him behind a stall, “you don’t need to flirt so much.”
“Babe,” Childe says, “I’m Snezhnayan. This is me toning it down.”
---
Zhongli blushes.
All the time.
Childe will so much as brush his fingers against his wrist and Zhongli turns into a slow-roasted caramel.
“You’re so bad at this,” Childe says cheerfully one night, while Zhongli is hiding behind a menu in a very public tea house, whispering “we are fake dating” like it’s an exorcism spell.
“I am not bad at anything,” Zhongli says through gritted teeth.
“Oh no? Then why are you stuttering every time I call you handsome?”
“I am simply… flustered. By your poor acting skills.”
“Sure,” Childe says, slurping his soup, “that’s why you leaned into me when I whispered I’d bite you.”
“I did not.”
“You did. And then you sighed.”
“I was tired.”
“You moaned.”
“I have allergies.”
“To me?”
Zhongli glares. Childe grins. Hu Tao, from across the room, waves encouragingly.
Zhongli sighs. “I regret everything.”
“Babe,” Childe says, “I don’t.”
---
The thing is—
Zhongli is bad at pretending.
Which is unfortunate, because he is usually good at everything.
But the problem is this: he has spent too long being earnest. Too long mastering sincerity. Too long believing that feelings are sacred and words are stone. So when he tries to lie—
He tells the truth by accident.
“Tell me again how we met,” Childe says one night, sprawled across Zhongli’s couch like a golden retriever with too many knives.
Zhongli, without thinking, says, “You made a foolish wager with a god.”
Childe’s breath hitches.
“You wore your recklessness like armor,” Zhongli continues. “You tried to flirt with death. I found it... charming.”
There is silence.
It stretches too long.
Zhongli, mortified, pretends to cough.
Childe stares at him like he’s just been handed a love letter instead of a fabricated backstory.
“That’s not funny,” Childe says.
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
---
It’s the little things that begin to ruin them.
Childe stops flirting with other people.
He starts holding Zhongli’s hand even when no one is looking.
He starts brushing lint off his lapels, lingering just a little too long.
Zhongli lets him.
Worse, he starts bringing Childe tea in the morning. He remembers how he likes it (sweet, like violence; hot, like threats).
He starts making two cups instead of one without thinking.
He starts reading out loud just because Childe likes the sound of his voice.
And every time he looks at Childe and sees the soft curve of a smile that wasn’t there before—
He thinks, oh no.
---
Things escalate.
It starts with fake kissing, which becomes slightly less fake kissing. Which becomes a lot of “we should practice so it’s believable,” and “Hu Tao might be watching,” and “it’s culturally appropriate to bite your boyfriend’s throat in Snezhnaya, I swear.”
It’s a slippery slope. One moment they’re holding hands to maintain “appearances,” the next Childe is leaving a toothbrush at Zhongli’s apartment “for realism.”
Zhongli doesn’t argue.
He also doesn’t throw out the toothbrush.
Or the spare gloves. Or the scarf that “accidentally” gets left on his bed. Or the takeout boxes labeled “for my husband <3” in awful Sharpie.
They are fake-dating. Thoroughly.
They are also, somehow, genuinely falling into some kind of domestic rhythm—kissing on command, cooking together, bickering about teapot placements, arguing over the philosophical morality of table salt.
And then pretending that none of it matters.
Which, unfortunately, Zhongli is extremely bad at.
He writes poetry about Childe’s freckles. He rearranges his cabinet so Childe’s tea goes on the top shelf. He learns Snezhnayan swear words because “his accent is terrible and someone must correct him.”
And when Childe laughs—too loud, too bright—Zhongli sometimes forgets they’re pretending.
“You like me,” Childe says one night, out of nowhere, sprawled in Zhongli’s lap like a cat that’s too pretty for its own good.
Zhongli, halfway through brushing his fingers through Childe’s hair, freezes.
“I like many things,” he says.
Childe grins. “Sure. History. Contracts. Geo constructs. Me.”
“You are occasionally tolerable.”
“You made me soup when I had a cold.”
“You were weeping.”
“You tucked me in.”
“You insisted on being swaddled like a dumpling.”
Childe shifts, expression softening. “I like you too, y’know.”
Zhongli’s hand pauses in his hair. The silence stretches.
“…I know,” Zhongli says quietly.
“I think Hu Tao knows too.”
“She has known since the beginning,” Zhongli admits. “She color-coded our compatibility chart.”
“She made one?”
“Yes. Yours was laminated.”
---
Eventually, the pretending stops. Or maybe it never started.
Hu Tao hosts another matchmaking banquet. Zhongli declines.
“I’m afraid my heart is spoken for,” he says, and this time, he doesn’t glance at the door.
Childe’s already beside him, arms crossed, smirking like he’s just been handed a trophy.
Hu Tao sighs.
“I was rooting for you two from the beginning.”
Zhongli raises an eyebrow. “So it was a setup?”
“No,” she says, tossing her clipboard into the fire. “Just… heavily encouraged fate.”
---
Zhongli still makes rules.
Childe still breaks them.
Hu Tao still gags in the corner whenever they hold hands.
But sometimes—when Zhongli reads aloud from ancient texts and Childe watches him like he’s witnessing a miracle, when Zhongli adjusts Childe’s collar before a banquet and lets his fingers linger, when they curl around each other on cold Liyue nights and argue over who snores louder (Zhongli denies it, Childe records proof)—they realize something:
Love is not unlike contracts.
Sometimes you sign it thinking it’s temporary.
And then you die with it still etched in your bones.
And sometimes—if you’re really lucky—it’s the best mistake you’ll ever make.