#lovar

"You really cannot drag a Fontainian merchant to our interrogation room just because Varka is being friendly to her, Lohen," Mika said, for the third time in as many minutes. He'd tried distracting Lohen with reports, even pulled out the correct monster-camp map this time as a peace offering, but Lohen's eyes hadn't left the scene happening a few meters away. The Vice Captain's fork kept stabbing his salad blindly, as if the lettuce had a criminal record. Mika had never, in his short life, seen anyone eat something so harmless, so menacingly.

Kaeya, sipping apple cider beside them (because Lohen had threatened bodily harm at the idea of wine before nine in the morning), hummed thoughtfully. "Yeah, you can't," he agreed, and Mika's head snapped up with hope. "Unless we find something very suspicious inside her wares. Then maybe you can drag her in for a few hours before Jean inevitably finds out."

The hope died an immediate, horrible death. Especially when Lohen looked as though he was actually considering it.

Mika immediately considered begging the Anemo Archon to whisk him away. To Sumeru, maybe. He'd never been to Sumeru. He'd heard the landscape was beautiful. He could probably draw excellent maps there that wouldn't get stolen by sneaky vice captains with trust issues and a god complex about his boyfriend.

"She's a legitimate merchant," Mika pressed on valiantly. Or stupidly, thought Lohen not unkindly, for someone so smart. "We already checked her belongings. Even the personal ones. Her documents are in order. She's here for business. Please don't plant anything suspicious in her things just so you have an excuse to act on your jealousy." Mika nearly begged.

Lohen finally looked away from the woman in the absurd hat, currently beaming an even more outrageous air of delight at Varka. His gaze then landed on his own massacred breakfast.

The three of them: Lohen, Mika, and Kaeya had met up that morning to eat and gossip. Or, well, "gossip" was Kaeya's word for it. Lohen had only shown up because Kaeya dragged him. Mika had only shown up because Kaeya dragged him along, even though he had gone only to find Lohen, since his surveying map had gone missing for the second time that week. They'd been having a perfectly normal morning, enjoying the nice breeze, the warm food, and very much not discussing anything that would alarm a law-abiding citizen. That was right up until Varka wandered into the city square and, notably, didn't come over to join them like any sensible person fleeing Jean's paperwork would. Instead, they all watched him bounce on his toes to greet the Fontainian merchant who lit up like a firework show.

So, now here they were, with Lohen quietly assembling a conspiracy theory with the focus of a man building a siege weapon.

For the last several days, Varka had been acting strange. He had been unusually buried in work— or that was what he'd told Lohen when Lohen asked why he hadn't found Varka sneaking into his office during work hours as per usual. Except when Lohen actually went to check in on him that one time, the Grand Master's office had been empty. Also, Varka had been smiling a lot. Not suspicious on its own, except none of those smiles had been pointed at Lohen. Instead, Lohen kept catching him grinning down at some papers that weren't about work for sure, which was, frankly, an insult to everything Lohen knew about this lazy, paperwork-allergic man.

So, Varka had been acting weird and lying about it. And no one— no one could argue otherwise because no one knew Varka better than Lohen did. When Lohen said something was wrong, it was wrong. Especially with evidence this damning: the merchant.

The second meeting with the merchant.

The third meeting.

And, most damning of all, Varka's flat refusal to say what they'd been discussing.

That alone was basically a confession.

"You know," Kaeya said, swirling his cider, the corners of his lips quirking up serenely, "most people would just ask their significant other what they're doing."

Lohen looked at him.

Kaeya looked back.

"..."

"..."

"You know what? Never mind. You're right. Continue on."

Mika buried his face in his hands. He was also muttering something that suspiciously sounded like a prayer under his breath.

Mika was ready with another argument when Lohen's attention snapped back to the square at the most ill-chosen moment ever. It was as though he was guided by a chaotic hand of fate because, at that very second, the merchant chose to laugh at something Varka said. Merrily. And Varka laughed back. The one laugh that came way too easily, way too brightly. That one big unguarded laugh that Lohen knew the way he knew the weight of his own spears, and that this one spear wasn't supposed to leave the house.

Catastrophe struck then, fresh and total.

His boyfriend. Being charming. At someone else.

"She touched his arm,” Lohen said, flat.

Mika made a small, strangled sound.

Kaeya leaned forward with the enthusiasm of a tavern bard sensing free material. "Oh, she did."

"Kaeya," Mika lamented.

"What? She did.”

“Kaeya.”

“I'm just reporting. Accurately, if I might add."

"Kaeya, please."

"It's called journalism, Mika."

Lohen's gaze sharpened to a point. The merchant was still smiling. Varka was still smiling. Neither of them had spontaneously combusted yet, which felt, frankly, irresponsible of the universe.

"Maybe I should slip something into her tea,” Lohen noted amiably. The tone he used was of someone noting the weather.

Mika nearly went over backward in his chair. "No!"

"Just a little."

"NO."

"A non-lethal amount. Mildly debilitating, at worst. She'd probably enjoy the nap."

"THAT IS STILL POISON, LOHEN."

"You say that like it's an argument."

Mika looked, briefly, like a man reconsidering every career choice that had led him to this table. Kaeya just looked delighted, which helped no one.

Across the square, Varka glanced over like he'd felt the weight of being plotted against, which, fair— and their eyes met.

He smiled. Immediately. Easily. Fondly, even.

That smile. The one with no edges to it. The one that existed, as far as Lohen had ever been able to verify through years of rigorous and entirely justified surveillance, was only for him.

Then he waved, bright and unbothered, like a man with absolutely nothing to hide.

Lohen's murder math dropped by maybe thirty-seven percent. Miraculous. Maybe Lord Barbatos was actively looking after them today.

"See? Everything's fine." Mika exhaled in relief.

Lohen narrowed his eyes anyway. "He's hiding something."

"How did you get that from a wave?"

"He used the smile."

"...The smile?"

"The smile."

Kaeya nodded along, gravely, like this was self-evident. "The smile."

Mika looked between the two of them, lost. "I don't know what that means."

Neither of them elaborated. 

---

Three days later, the situation somehow got worse.

Varka met the merchant again.

Lohen knew because he had followed them. For investigative purposes. Purely professional. That was what he told himself, at least. In truth, there was a sharp, unpleasant twist in his chest every time he pictured Varka laughing too freely, or leaning in too close, or smiling that easy, sunlit smile at someone who hadn't earned it through years of bleeding for it the way Lohen had. It wasn't that he thought the man would actually be stolen. Varka was hopelessly, embarrassingly his, had been for years, and Lohen knew it with the same bone-deep certainty he knew the weight of his own Vision. He just couldn't help it. He never could. It was humiliating, honestly, how little control he had over something he already knew the ending to.

The investigation revealed absolutely nothing useful. The merchant sold antiques. Varka had, apparently, more patience for browsing chipped teacups than anyone had ever suspected. And Kaeya had started a betting pool on whether Lohen would commit a felony before the week was out.

The current odds were not in Lohen's favor.

"You're stalking him."

Lohen glanced sideways at Jean, who had, somehow, found him. On a roof. Which should have been impossible, except this was Jean, who Lohen privately suspected ran on pure spite and the will to suffer.

"No."

"You are standing on a roof," she stated like law.

Lohen didn’t even flinch. "It's good for visibility."

"And that’s a pair of binoculars."

“Yes, thank you for noticing,” replied Lohen, before adding: "They're for work."

"You are not currently on duty."

"I'm always on duty," he countered with the airy dignity of a man who had, in fact, been lying flat on his stomach behind a chimney for the past forty minutes. "Knightly vigilance doesn't clock out, Jean."

Jean stared at him. The kind of stare that had once made three separate captains spontaneously confess to unrelated crimes.

Lohen stared back, unbothered, because he had been stared down by Varka mid-poisoning attempt and lived to tell the tale. Jean simply didn’t have the range.

"...Fine," she said at last, sounding profoundly, spiritually tired. "Just don't kill anybody."

"That depends."

Jean had that look. The one that conveyed she was suppressing a migraine. "No, it doesn't."

"It depends on her."

"Lohen."

"I'm joking," Lohen said, in a tone that did not sound like joking at all.

Jean looked, briefly, like she was asking higher beings for patience. She then walked away at a pace just shy of fleeing.

Lohen returned to his binoculars. The merchant was holding up a chipped teacup. Varka was nodding along like it was the most fascinating object he'd ever seen in his life.

Lohen's faith in humanity dropped another two percent.

--

By the end of the week, Lohen had arrived at exactly one conclusion: the only way to uncover the truth was direct confrontation.

Unfortunately, direct confrontation required talking about feelings, which was, frankly, a worse prospect than the interrogation room plan, the mysterious substances people could slip on unsuspecting drinks, and the rooftop showdown combined.

Still. Sacrifices had to be made. He'd faced down the Wild Hunt with less dread than he felt walking toward the Grand Master's office that evening.

Varka looked up from his paperwork the second the door opened, and immediately smiled.

There it was. The smile.

Lohen narrowed his eyes on principle.

Varka narrowed his eyes right back, clearly enjoying himself far too much for a man under active investigation. "...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I have questions."

"Gods help me." He set his pen down anyway, which Lohen concluded as evidence of guilt. An innocent man would have kept on writing. Probably. Certainly. “Shoot, what do you need?”

With that, Lohen decided to be merciless from the start. "You've been spending a lot of time with a merchant."

Varka froze. Just for half a second. A flicker, barely there. The kind of thing only someone who'd spent years studying every twitch of this man's face would catch.

Lohen caught it.

Aha.

"I see," Lohen said, with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching his trap spring shut.

"You see what?"

"You hesitated."

"That's because you opened with the verbal equivalent of kicking down a door."

Lohen folded his arms, undeterred. "Are you hiding something?"

A pause. A long one. Long enough that Lohen's pulse did something unbearably annoying.

Then Varka sighed and said, "Technically."

Lohen's heart dropped. Not all the way (he refused to give it the satisfaction), but enough to be deeply, personally inconvenient.

"Oh."

Varka's brows shot up. "What do you mean, 'oh'?"

"You admitted it."

"I admitted I was hiding something."

"Exactly. A confession," Lohen said.

"That doesn't sound nearly as incriminating as you seem to think it does."

Lohen stared at him, searching his face for the shape of the lie. Varka stared back, entirely too at ease for a guilty man— And then, infuriatingly, he started to laugh.

Actually laugh. The full, unfair, chest-deep kind.

"Oh," Varka said, wiping at his eye. "Oh, sweetheart."

The endearment landed like a physical blow. Lohen hated how it got to him, every damn time, no matter how many times he swore it wouldn’t.

It wasn't even a word Varka used often. That was the worst part. He doled it out rarely enough that Lohen had never managed to build up a proper immunity to it, the way he had with ‘dear’ or the increasingly common ‘you menace’; both of which had long since lost their teeth from overuse. ‘Sweetheart’ he saved for exactly these moments: the ones where he'd already won, and knew it, and wanted Lohen to know it too. A precision strike.

"You're jealous," Varka said, grinning.

Lohen’s defense was too immediate to be true. "No."

"You are."

"I am a professional knight conducting a professional inquiry." There was nothing professional about any of this. Not even a little.

Varka’s grin grew impossibly wider. "You're jealous, and it's adorable."

"I will poison you."

"You won't."

"I have before."

"And I forgave you," Varka said, far too fondly for the statement to make any sense, "which should tell you something about how this works."

Before Lohen could decide whether to be offended or smug about that, Varka pushed back from his desk and stood. He beckoned Lohen with an inviting arm. The arm Lohen loved circling his waist any other time. Now was not the time. Yet, Varka didn’t seem to agree.

"C’mere."

"No."

"Lohen."

"Absolutely not."

"Lohen."

"...Fine," Lohen said, with the air of a man making an enormous personal sacrifice, and crossed the room anyway, because years into this relationship, he still had no spine whatsoever when Varka used that exact tone.

Victorious, Varka bent and pulled a wooden box out from beneath the desk.

Lohen's suspicion reignited instantly. "What is that?"

"A box."

"I know that. What's inside it?" he demanded.

"If I tell you, it defeats the purpose."

"You're being mysterious. Mysterious people are usually hiding bodies or affairs."

"It's neither," Varka said, and there was something different in his voice now. Something softer, a little uncertain, nothing like the easy teasing from a moment ago. "I was trying to surprise you."

That gave Lohen pause more effectively than any denial could have. He took the box when Varka held it out, turning it over once. The wood was old. Worn smooth at the corners from handling, but cared for. Oiled, mended in one place along the seam. Whatever was inside, it had been kept as if it mattered.

Something in Lohen's chest tightened before he even opened the lid.

He lifted it anyway. Inside sat the single ugliest bird he had ever seen in his life. A little automaton, wings set at uneven angles, paint chipped down to bare metal in places, its beak crooked like it had lost an argument with a wall. One eye was visibly, tragically larger than the other.

Lohen stopped breathing.

The office went very quiet.

Varka's teasing expression melted into something gentler as he watched him carefully now. It was as though he was bracing to read a reaction he couldn't predict.

"...How." Lohen finally managed. It didn't come out as a question. It came out cracked down the middle.

Because Lohen remembered this thing. A much smaller version of himself, running through the woods with this exact ugly bird tucked under one arm like the most precious cargo in all of Teyvat. His father's laugh, deep and easy, the kind he hadn't heard nearly often enough before everything changed. A gift hauled all the way from Fontaine by some merchant his parents had known. The only thing that had ever felt like his, that hadn't been a bow or a lesson— just a stupid, ugly little toy that had survived exactly as long as childhood did, and then vanished the day everything else did, too.

He had never told anyone the whole story. He'd barely told Varka the whole story.

"I remembered you talking about it," Varka said, rubbing the back of his neck. He was actually, genuinely embarrassed, which on a man who'd once threatened a Fatui Harbinger without blinking was almost funny.

"I mentioned it once."

"You talked about it for twenty-three minutes."

Lohen blinked at him. "...You counted?"

"You wouldn't stop."

"I was making a point about Fontainian craftsmanship."

Varka snorted. "You were ranting about how ugly it was."

"It is ugly."

"It still is," Varka agreed, entirely too gently for the words.

Lohen looked down at it again. Mismatched eyes stared back up at him, hideous and lopsided and somehow, impossibly, exactly the way he remembered it.

His throat had gone tight in a way he didn't appreciate and couldn't seem to undo.

"I mentioned it once," he said again, like repeating it might make it less true that Varka had clearly gone looking, tracked down a merchant who dealt in exactly this kind of old, half-forgotten Fontainian craftsmanship, sat through gods knew how many meetings, all to find one specific, ugly little bird that meant nothing to anyone except a boy who didn't exist anymore.

That was what the merchant had been. Not charm. Not flirtation. A search party.

Lohen found himself confronted with the deeply irritating realization that his jealousy had been competing with a gift. Lohen would never hear the end of this if Kaeya found out.

"You mentioned one of the only things from your childhood that ever made you happy," Varka said, quiet now, all the teasing gone out of him entirely. "I wasn't going to forget that."

The words landed softly. Dangerously soft. The kind of soft that got past every single one of Lohen's defenses without even trying, because Varka never had to try. That was the whole unfair tragedy of loving this man.

"You remembered all of that. From one conversation. Years ago."

"Yes, I remember all of it," Varka said, like it wasn't even a choice he'd made, like loving Lohen thoroughly enough to remember every stray detail he let slip was simply a fact of the world, no more remarkable than the wind blowing west to east.

For once in his life, Lohen had nothing to say. No deflection, no joke, no clever angle to retreat behind. He just stood there with a hideous bird in his hands and entirely too much feeling crowding his chest, and let it happen.

"You remembered," he said again. And this time, it came out small. Younger than he'd meant it to. Just as disbelieving.

Varka looked at him like the question itself didn't make sense. Like there had never been a version of events where he wouldn't. "Of course I did." A beat. "I'd remember anything you gave me, Lohen. You should know that by now."

Something in Lohen's chest gave way completely.

He set the box down on the desk, carefully, the way you'd set down something that had survived a war, and crossed the last of the distance between them in two steps, fisting both hands into the front of Varka's shirt to drag him down to his level.

Varka made a startled sound, half laugh, half question, that died the instant Lohen’s lips met his.

The kiss wasn't a careful one, like most of their kisses tend to be. It wasn't measured. This was just want, plain and unguarded, all the things he didn't have words for poured into something he could actually do something with. Varka recovered fast, one large hand threading into Lohen’s hair while the other anchored firmly at the small of his back, and pulled him in like he'd been waiting all evening for exactly this.

Lohen tightened his grip in return. A sound tore from his throat, desperate and low and needy, as he kissed Varka deeper and deeper.

When they finally broke apart, Lohen didn't let go of his shirt. Didn't move back. Just stayed there, forehead pressed to Varka's collarbone, breathing hard, and fully embracing how much he needed the contact.

Varka didn't push him to move either. He just stood there and took the weight of him, one hand splayed warm between Lohen's shoulder blades, the other still loose in his hair, like he had absolutely nowhere else in the world that mattered more than this exact spot in this exact office.

The candle on the desk had burned low. Outside, someone was laughing in the courtyard and someone else was berating them. Knights finishing up evening drills, probably. The city’s normal bustle carried on, oblivious to the subtle shift that had just occurred within these walls.

Neither of them said anything for a while. The silence wasn't uncomfortable; it simply felt complete in its own right.

"I hate you," Lohen muttered, muffled, entirely without venom. Maybe even something fond.

"Mm." Varka's voice rumbled warmly above him, the fingers in his hair gently threading through soft strands. "You said you'd poison me ten minutes ago."

"That offer's still open."

"Noted."

"I'm still angry about the merchant," Lohen added, because he could.

"You weren't supposed to find out this way."

"You should have just told me."

"And ruin the surprise?" Varka tipped Lohen's chin up with one finger, forcing him to look up. Whatever Lohen's face was doing made something in Varka's own expression go soft and a little wrecked. "Worth it."

That was, unfairly, a fair argument.

"I plotted three separate crimes over this," Lohen said.

"I heard. Jean mentioned finding you on a roof."

"Jean talks too much."

"Jean is the only reason I finished this in time. She told me you'd snapped sometime around Tuesday."

Lohen glared straight at him for that. "You had Jean helping you."

"She has excellent administrative instincts."

"She let me think you were having an affair for an entire week."

"In her defense, I told her not to tell you anything." Varka's mouth twitched, fighting a smile and losing. "She did suggest, several times, that I just tell you myself and skip all this."

"You should have listened to her."

"And miss that face you just made? Not a chance."

Lohen considered, briefly and seriously, exactly how satisfying it would be to bite him. He could do that later, for sure, a plan he’d save for bed, because Varka wouldn’t be getting away with it this easily. For now, Lohen contented himself with a sharp pinch to Varka’s hip, hard, which earned him an undignified yelp and absolutely no apologies from either party.

"You're impossible," Lohen said.

"You like that about me," grinned Varka.

"I tolerate that about you."

"Mhm." Varka slid his hand to cup Lohen’s jaw, his thumb tracing a gentle line along his cheek before he leaned in and pressed a slow kiss to the corner of Lohen’s mouth. Not quite where Lohen wanted it aimed at, and clearly on purpose, the smug bastard. "Tolerate me a little longer, then."

Lohen turned his head just enough to catch his mouth properly and kissed him again. This time, it was slower than before, no urgency behind it at all. Something he did just because he could, and because he always wanted to. Because the ugly little bird was still sitting on the desk, and because the man holding him had apparently spent weeks of his very busy, very important life hunting down a children's toy just to put something back together for Lohen.

"Thank you," Lohen said, when he finally let him go, low enough that it almost didn't sound like him at all.

Varka went still for a second. Really still. The kind of still that said Lohen’s words had caught him off guard. And then, he smiled. That smile. The one Lohen had spent years confirming belonged to no one else, no matter how many merchants or knights or visiting dignitaries got a polite, charming, perfectly ordinary version of it. This one was all tenderness, all warmth, and always just for him.

"Always," he said simply, and kissed his forehead like sealing something gently.

For a long moment, Lohen let himself just stay there, tucked against him, the ugly little bird watching them both from the desk with its mismatched eyes and its crooked beak and its general air of having weathered more than it should have.

Much like its owner.

Eventually, inevitably, Varka ruined it. "You should probably apologize to Jean."

"Absolutely not."

"She did help."

"She let an innocent woman get followed onto a rooftop's worth of surveillance," Lohen argued, not at all indignant whatsoever.

"You followed her, not Jean."

"Jean knew."

"Jean knows everything. It's practically her Vision's power."

Lohen made a noise of deep, dramatic suffering and let his head fall back against Varka's shoulder, which only made the man laugh. That big, easy, unguarded laugh. The one Lohen knew the weight of the way he knew the weight of his own spears, the one that wasn't supposed to leave the house.

It hadn't, in the end. It never had. The merchant had just been borrowing it for a good cause.

Lohen decided, magnanimously, that she could keep her teacups.

He was, however, still going to find some way to make Jean suffer for this. The merchant, too, on principle. Good cause or not, she'd still touched Varka’s arm, still laughed at whatever charming nonsense Varka had said to keep her cooperating, and Lohen wasn't in the business of letting that go unpunished just because it had turned out to be useful. He'd think of something fitting. Later. After he'd finished deciding exactly where in their quarters the bird belonged. After some bites had been given. And after he'd stopped feeling like his own ribs were a size too small for everything currently sitting inside them.

That part, he kept to himself. Some things, even Varka didn't need to know the full shape of. Just that he was loved, apparently, down to the smallest, ugliest, most forgotten detail of him.