A demonically devastating adorable heir and friends

The first letter showed up tucked under your door on a Tuesday.

You almost missed it entirely, your boot nearly crushing the folded parchment on your way out for morning drills. The handwriting on the outside was unmistakably clean, almost aggressively so, each letter formed like whoever wrote it had been taught penmanship at knifepoint. You didn't need to look inside of it to know who it was from. You opened it anyway, standing in your doorway with your cape half-fastened. You stood there reading it twice because you genuinely couldn't believe what you were reading.

I've been watching the way you fight for a while now. I'd like to see it up close. Spar with me sometime — Love always, Lohen.

You folded it back up and went directly to your drills. You didn't say anything to anyone.

You told yourself it was probably nothing. Lohen was the sort of person who said strange things in strange ways and meant nothing particularly alarming by them. You'd seen him joke with other members of the Knights of Favonius in a manner that made bystanders shift uncomfortably while everyone in the immediate vicinity pretended it was funny. That was just simply just how he was. It didn't mean anything. The letter went on the corner of your desk and you didn't look at it again.

The second letter came three days later.

You didn't answer. I'll ask again when you're less busy. — Love always, Lohen.

You set it on top of the first one.

By the fifth letter you had a small, neat stack going, which you refused to examine the implications of. They were crowding up on your desk, so you just shoved them in a drawer. You weren't keeping them for any meaningful reason. You just hadn't thrown them out yet.

The content of them varied. Some were short. Barely a sentence, just checking in, complimenting aspects you’ve improved in. Others ran longer, seeming almost involuntary, almost as if  he'd sat down intending to write two lines and hadn't been able to stop. He wrote about finding your dedication irritating in a way he couldn't explain. Mundane things like the way you held your weapon like you were angry at it, or how he'd started timing your drills from across the yard without really meaning to. None of it was poetic in the slightest. All of it was extremely specific, and you just knew by then that he was following you.

When he finally asked you in person, you were coming out of a briefing and barely had time to register that he'd fallen into step beside you before he was already talking.

"So." He kept pace with you easily, hands loose at his sides. "You got the letters."

"I got the letters," you confirmed.

"And?"

"And nothing. I've been busy."

He looked at you sideways, that little grin appearing at the corner of his mouth. "You've been avoiding me."

"I've been busy," you repeated, and turned down the corridor toward the armory.

He followed. Of course he followed. "Those are different things."

"Lohen."

"I'm just saying."

You stopped walking and turned to face him, which in retrospect gave him exactly what he wanted because now he was looking at you with his full attention. Head slightly tilted, and it was very difficult to have a normal train of thought when Lohen was looking at you like that. "What is it that you actually want?" you asked. "Specifically."

The grin softened into something more genuine. "To spar. I said that in the first letter."

"That's all?"

He considered that for a beat too long. "For now."

You told him you'd think about it. He said okay, still smiling, and wandered off swinging his dagger handle over his shoulder completely unbothered.

The sparring happened eventually. That was your first mistake, agreeing to it and then actually enjoying yourself. Lohen was a genuinely incredible fighter in the unnerving way that people who love violence tend to be, fighting him was the most engaged you'd felt in a drill in months. He pulled a move in the third round that sent your weapon skidding across the floor and when you looked up from the ground he was crouched over you with the blunted sparring blade at your throat, grinning like he'd just been handed something he'd wanted for a very long time.

"Yield," he said.

"I yield," you said, slightly winded.

He pulled you to your feet without being asked, grip firm on your forearm, and didn't let go quite as quickly as necessary. "You're good," he said, which coming from Lohen you understood to be a serious compliment. "Your right side's open when you commit to an overhead strike though. Someone's going to take advantage of that eventually."

"I'm aware," you said, taking your arm back.

"Good." He handed you your weapon. "Same time next week?"

You said maybe. He took maybe and ran with it.

The package showed up alongside the seventh letter. A piece of dried Mondstadt berry fruit wrapped in brown paper that you’ve mentioned to enjoy eating. No explanation this time, just the usual sign-off. You unwrapped it standing at your desk at six in the morning and stood there for a moment looking at it. It was an incredibly small and stupid gesture. You ate the fruit, threw out the wrapper and went to work.

But he kept showing up. Lohen was many things but he had a particular talent for positioning himself at the exact boundary of too much without crossing it, appearing after briefings, falling into step beside you on patrol routes, even occasionally materializing in the training yard when you were already there. He'd talk, or he wouldn't. Sometimes he just existed nearby in a way that should have been annoying and wasn't.

"Can I ask you something," you said one afternoon. You were both cooling down after another sparring session, sitting on the bench outside the training yard with your respective water flasks. The evening light was doing something irritating to his hair.

"Mhm."

"Why me." It came out more direct than you'd intended but you were tired and your shoulder hurt. You'd decided you wanted an actual answer. "There are plenty of people in the fifth company. In the whole knights, actually. Why—" you gestured vaguely.

Lohen took a long drink from his flask and looked out across the yard. He was quiet for a moment, which on him meant he was actually considering the question.

 "Honest answer?"

"Please."

"You don't laugh at things that aren't funny," he said. "Most people, when I'm around, they laugh. At things that aren't funny. Because they're uncomfortable and they don't know what else to do." He glanced at you. "You don't do that. You just look at me like you're trying to figure out what I actually am. I find that… interesting."

You didn't know what to do with that. You looked down at your flask. "That's a very specific thing to notice."

"I notice specific things."

"Clearly," you said. A beat. "I still haven't decided anything, you know. About whatever this is."

"I know." He didn't sound bothered. "I'm not in a hurry."

That was, you would realize much later, either completely true or the most patient kind of lie. At the time you took it at face value and felt something in your chest loosen slightly, which was its own kind of problem.

Two months in, you had a small stack of letters, a standing weekly sparring appointment, and absolutely no idea what you were doing. Every time you got close to forming an actual thought about it, about him, something in your chest pulled in two directions at once and you ended up where you always ended up, which was telling yourself you needed more time.

Kaeya, who had no business being this perceptive about anyone's life but his own, cornered you in the library on a Thursday and told you that you looked miserable.

"I'm not miserable," you told him.

"You've mentioned Lohen four times in the last two weeks without me bringing him up first," he said.

You didn't have a good response to that.

What you had instead was a nagging anxiety that showed up every time he left another letter, every time he showed up in the training yard and made a dry comment that somehow always landed as a compliment. You kept thinking about what he'd said. “You look at me like you're trying to figure out what I actually am.” The problem was you were still trying to figure that out and the closer you got to an answer the less straightforward it felt.

He asked you to dinner somewhere in the eighth week at the end of a sparring session. It was moreover casual than romantic, thrown out while he was wrapping his wrist, like the answer didn't particularly matter to him either way.

"Dinner," you repeated.

"There's a place on the east side of the market that's decent. Nothing fancy." He glanced up. "Unless you need it to be fancy."

"I don't need it to be fancy." You hesitated. "I need a little more time, Lohen."

His hands stilled briefly on the wrap. "How much time?"

"I don't know."

"No worries, I’ll always be here waiting."

"I know," you said. "I'm sorry."

He held your gaze for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes that you couldn't fully read, and then he finished wrapping his wrist and said fine, and that was that. He didn't push. He went back to showing up anyway, letters and sparring and the occasional comment in passing, and you went back to not throwing the letters out and telling yourself you were still thinking.

When he finally cornered you for real, it wasn't after a briefing. It was outside the stables in the early evening, arms crossed and a look on his face that you'd never quite seen on him before. That look stripped of the usual amusement, just bare and a little tired.

"Okay," he said. "What's going on?"

You said you didn't know what he meant, and he gave you the flattest look you'd ever received from another human being. He said he'd been doing this for months. Asking once and letting it go each time you gave him a non-answer. He wasn't an idiot, so he wanted to know what was actually happening.

You looked at the fence post behind his shoulder for a long moment. When the truth finally came out it felt absurdly small. You'd never been in a relationship before. You genuinely didn't know how any of it worked and the thought of getting it wrong sat in your chest like a stone. And more than that — you were a knight. That position meant something. You had duties that didn't pause for personal complications and adding something like this on top of it felt like setting yourself up to fail at both.

Lohen was quiet through all of it, leaning against the fence post with his arms still crossed, watching you.

"So it's a no," he said when you finished.

A pause. "Yes."

Another pause. "You're sure."

The way he said it wasn't hopeful. It was the tone of someone documenting information. Like he was making sure he had the right data before he did something with it. You said yes, you were sure, and you were sorry, you genuinely didn't want to hurt his feelings, it was just the way things were.

Something moved across his face, fast and then gone. He nodded once. Said he appreciated you being straight with him. Pushed off the fence post and walked away down the path without looking back, and you stood there in the cooling evening with that specific feeling of having done the right thing while something in your chest insisted on making the occasion miserable anyway.

You went home. You told yourself by morning you'd feel settled about it.

Oh, how wrong you were.

Three days passed. A week. Lohen wasn't in the training yard on the usual day, and he didn't bother you after the next briefing either. No letters came. The absence of them was somehow more profound than the letters themselves had been, which was an infuriating thing to notice and you noticed it anyway. The stack in your drawer sat exactly where it was.

On the eighth day you walked past him in the corridor outside the armory and he glanced at you. He said good morning the same way he'd say it to anyone, pleasant and completely impersonal, and you said good morning back and kept walking. Something in your chest did something you were going to have to deal with eventually.

You just didn't know it would be quite this soon.

The eighth day turned into a ninth, then a tenth, and at some point you stopped counting.

You were sitting at your desk on a Thursday evening, drinking your favorite tea as usual. You were trying very hard to read a patrol report that kept not getting read, when you noticed the candle had burned down further than it should have. The room felt heavier than usual, a little too still. 

You were unusually… more tired than you were after your regular training sessions. You kept trying to fight the feeling of sleep. You reached to take another sip of your tea in desperation to find something to keep you awake. As you were lowering the cup, you lost your grip on it and it shattered on the floor. And then, after trying to reach for it between one breath and the next, the world gradually went dark as you passed out on your desk. 

You came back to yourself in stages. The first thing you registered was cloth against your eyes, tight enough that no light got through. The second was that your wrists were bound behind you, and the chair you were sitting in was not your chair. The rope was real and the knot was a good one; you tested it with steady pressure and got nothing, which told you whoever tied it was skilled. Your pulse kicked up, and you started cataloguing what you could. Stone floor. A room that smelled like cold air and old wood. Somewhere quiet enough that you could hear your own breathing clearly… and someone else’s?

"Lohen." You said it flat.

A pause. Then the low sound of him exhaling, close enough that you flinched. "Took you a second. How was your sleep, bunny?"

"Where am I."

"Somewhere private." His voice moved as he circled around you, unhurried. "Relax. You're not going to get anywhere pulling at those."

You stopped pulling, not because he told you to but because he was right, and you needed to think. "D– did you poison my tea!? This is insane and you know that."

"Mhm." He didn't sound particularly concerned about it. You heard the scrape of something against the floor, a chair maybe, and then his weight settling into it. He was close. Just in front of you, maybe two feet of distance. "I've been very patient with you."

"Patient," you repeated. "Lohen, this is kidnapping."

"I know what it is." There was no amusement in his voice now, just something flat and deliberate. "You told me no. I accepted that. Then I spent a week watching you walk past me in corridors like I was just anyone else, like I was nobody. I thought about it and I decided I wasn't done."

You kept very still. The thing about Lohen was that you'd always been able to gauge him in person, the way his attention worked, the specific quality of his focus. Right now that focus was aimed entirely at you and it felt different from how it ever had before. Stripped of the grin, of the easy posture. The patience he usually wore like a second skin was gone and what was underneath it was something with considerably more edge. "Untie me," you said.

"Not yet." He shifted. Something cool and flat pressed against the underside of your chin and you recognized the flat of a dagger blade before you'd finished processing that he'd moved. He tilted your face up slightly, then pulled the blindfold down with the same hand in one motion, and suddenly you could see him.

The room was dim, a single lantern somewhere to your left, and Lohen was crouched in front of your chair with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on you. He looked completely yet unsettlingly calm. "There you are," he said quietly.

You held his gaze. There was a version of this situation where you talked him down and negotiated your way out without escalating anything. You needed more information before you could figure out which version this was. "How long have you been planning this."

"Not long." He turned the dagger handle over once in his fingers, idle. "I wasn't planning it at all until I saw your face in the corridor. Said good morning, you said it back and kept walking like the last two months were nothing. Like they didn't happen." Something moved through his expression, fast. "They happened."

"I know they happened." You kept your voice even. "Lohen. Look at what you're doing right now. This isn't— you can find someone else. Someone who actually wants this, with you. I'm not the only person in the entirety of Mondstadt."

"I don't want just anyone in Mondstadt." He said it simply. "I want you specifically. I've been very clear about that."

"For two months," you said. "You've barely known me for a year."

"I know." And he said it in a tone that suggested he'd already had this argument with himself. He stood up from his crouch and you had to tip your head back slightly to keep looking at him. "Can I tell you something?"

You didn't answer. He was going to tell you regardless.

"The way you fight," he started, and then paused, and this was the thing about Lohen that had always been unsettling. The moments where his lackluster confidence gave way to something that was trying to find the right words. "When I watched you fight for the first time, I thought, that's someone who actually cares about the fight itself instead of the outcome. About what it means to be good at something." He looked at you steadily. "I haven't met a lot of people like that. In fact you might be the first. And then you turned me down and asked me to move on. I tried to [Name], I really did. But I couldn't, and after a while of trying I stopped wanting to." A pause. "So here we are."

The room was very quiet. You could hear the lantern flame.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "Y’know, I think about what I'm going to say to you more than I think about most things." He crouched again, level with you, and looked at you very directly. "Tell me something honest. If you’ve genuinely felt nothing this entire time, say it and I'll let you go right now. I'll cut the ropes, walk you out and you'll never have to deal with me again."

You opened your mouth. The silence that came out of it lasted longer than it should have.

His expression changed in increments, something satisfied and terribly knowing spreading across his face. "I knew it," he said softly. "I knew you felt something."

"Don't," you said sharply.

"You had every chance to say it. You just didn't." He stood up again, and the look on his face made the back of your neck prickle. "You've been lying to yourself this whole time. I've been watching you do it."

You pulled hard at the rope, more out of frustration than any belief it would work, and it didn't. "So what, this is your solution? Tie me to a chair until I admit it?"

"Seemed more effective than another letter." He reached around behind the chair and the ropes fell away from your wrists in one motion, dagger having passed through them cleanly. He stepped back, hands loose at his sides, watching you. The door was directly behind him. You clocked the distance immediately, the angle, whether you could get past him.

You moved.

You shoved up from the chair and went left to create a half-second of unpredictability, then cut right for the door. Your hand was almost on the handle when his arm came around you. He dragged you backward and down, the floor coming up fast. Then he had you pinned with his weight above you and a forearm across your collarbone and he was breathing harder now, the calm starting to crack at the edges. You tried to get your knee up and he shifted his weight to block it.

"Stop," he said.

"Get off me." You shoved at his shoulder and made exactly no progress.

"Stop," he said again, and there was something under the word that wasn't quite a warning and wasn't quite a request, and then his other hand came up and the dagger was there, edge resting against the side of your throat. You went very still.

He looked down at you and he was closer than he'd ever been. You could see his jaw working. "I love watching you squirm," he said, and his voice had gone low and a little uneven. "I do. But if you make me chase you every five seconds someone's going to get hurt, and I would really prefer that not to be you." He let a breath out. "So I need you to stop moving."

You stayed still. The dagger didn't move.

"You're going to lose your position," he said, quieter now, and there was something meticulous about the way he laid it out, like he'd planned exactly how he was going to say it. "The Grandmaster’s goodwill doesn't survive a Vice Captain's formal recommendation. I can make very specific complaints about your conduct in the field. Detailed ones. It would take me a week, maybe less." He held your gaze. "I don't want to do that. But I will, if you keep trying to run."

The cold precision of it landed worse than the dagger had. Your knighthood wasn't just a job. It was the reason you'd said no to him in the first place. It was years of drills, briefings, and choosing the work over everything else. He'd found the exact right pressure point and pressed it without any particular display of cruelty. You hated him for it. You also believed him entirely.

He was still watching you. Waiting.

“I hate you…”

“Wrong answer~” You closed your eyes. For a split second, you felt relief as the cold of the dagger left your neck for a short moment, before he replaced its position with his hand, effectively choking you.

You opened your eyes in desperation, you looked at him and made yourself hold it, his expression and the angle of the dagger. After struggling to breathe for what felt like an eternity, he finally replaced his hand with a dagger once more.

“You’re making this so much harder than it should be for the both of us… Y’know I hate seeing you in pain, bunny.”

"Okay, okay, okay! Fine…" you said. Your voice came out steadier than you'd expected.

He tilted his head.

"I'm sorry. I’m so sorry." The words tasted like nothing. You kept going anyway, because this was what survival was and you'd always been good at that. "I was scared. I didn't know how to handle it and I kept making excuses. You didn't deserve that." You made yourself look right at him, trying desperately to appeal to his delusions. "I do feel something. I have since the day we met. I just didn't know what to do with it."

The silence stretched. He was searching your face with the attention he'd always given you, the particular unnerving focus, looking for the seams in it. You kept your expression open. You'd always been good at drills. This was just a different kind.

“...I love you, Lohen.” You said insincerely, distaste frothing from your mouth.

Whatever he was looking for, he either found it or decided he would. The dagger disappeared. He leaned down and kissed you, one hand coming to rest against your jaw, and he kissed you like he'd been wanting to for archons know how long. When he pulled back there was something in his face that you'd never seen there before, a relief so raw it almost made you feel sorry for him. Almost.

"There," he said, and his thumb traced your cheek. "Was that so difficult, bunny?"

He almost laughed. He pulled you up from the floor and stood there with his hands on your face looking at you like he was checking that you were real. You let him, mainly because you were already deciding how much of this you could survive if you were patient.

"You're mine and we’re dating now. Understood? I want you to remember that every time you think about opening your mouth to the wrong person." He pulls back just enough to look at you. "I've already thought about what I'd do if you ran. I've had a week to think about it. Trust me when I say you don't want to find out if my imagination is accurate. Run, tell someone, do something stupid — and the next conversation we have won't be in a room with a door.”

You didn't answer him. You didn't need to. He pulled you close and you let him, and over his shoulder you looked at the door.

His cold lips planted themselves against yours once more.

 “I love you, [Name].”

₊⊹ WRITTEN BY @/riesvalentine ⸝⸝ do not steal/copy, translate (w/o permission or credit), or feed into ai