#psyche.whispers

1. so how you travel through time: you're a mortal married to zhongli. you only know him as the funeral parlour consultant. it's loveless marriage type of deal—somehow, you got swept up in his plan without realizing. eventually, you realize it was all orchestrated by him. you can't live like this. need to throw up your hands and wash clean of him, and in the middle of the night, you run away from your husband (gonna have to figure out how this happens because zhongli is a very clever man).

reach the bishui river—formed from the blood of adeptus, somehow through adepti magic (because of full moon maybe? or a special time in liyue, where demonic activity is higher than normal), you fall in. drowning, you grasp for the surface, only to then suddenly surface. fall onto the bank, and staring at you is zhongli... but not. he's not dressed in his consultant clothes. eyes a little more... reptilian. something about him is off, but you're too scared to care.

"so you found me in the end." your plan failed. your husband is here to take you back.

you close your eyes and wait for his anger, wait for your punishment, but there is only confusion in his voice when he says, almost growling, "who are you? and why do you have my mark?"

because of course zhongli marked you with his sigil. just fulfilling his duty of being a husband by broadcasting to every vision holder/adepti that, "hey! this is my spouse! no touching!"

2. really random sidenote but. past zhongli—let's call him morax—to basically try to seduce you (? is it seduce if it's forced).

you refuse, because you're still married. not that you care, but you don't like this zhongli any more than you do your zhongli, so you use your marriage vows as a deterrent. morax obviously pissed and is like, "why do you keep refusing me? who is this man? i'll just force him to divorce you, problem solved." but obviously, he can't find your husband in the first place.

then flash forward and somehow present zhongli is here to pick you up from this wacky trip in time. morax meets present zhongli. and his brain is just fried, realizing that he himself is your husband. and that he tried to divorce himself. did... did i just try to cuck myself??

meanwhile present zhongli asks you, did you cheat on me?? and you reply, is it cheating if it's with your husband, albeit a younger version of him. you're lying about it, just playing with him because you hate him and you wanna watch the world burn and him along with it. so now zhongli's brain just explodes at the implication, because is it cheating then?? is this breaking the sacred contract of marriage, if you cheat on him with... himself??

anyway. i just find the idea of zhongli cucking himself funny. then he gets into a fight with his past self, a battle of sarcasm and wit and occasionally fist. them being jealous of each other and thinking that somehow, this other version of themselves somehow got into your pants. imagine when it turns out the cockblock was their own selves all along. cue meme:

But anyway, so somehow you get transported into the past and meet the younger version of Zhongli, who's quite different from the person you know in the future. Maybe not overtly, because they still have the same mannerisms, but more... Aggressive. Less subtle about his affections. Less considerate about your feelings. Less patient. This was during the middle of the Archon War, after all, and Morax is fully embracing the warrior god title.

You tell them that you can't return their feelings, you're bound to someone else called Zhongli, and though you don't like that fact, it's the truth. Besides, you still have to find a way home. Morax just goes still when you tell him that, and says that he wants to meet this Zhongli... which of course, he can't. He talks about trade, about contracts, for the right to keep you. You get angry at that; were you a piece of jewelry meant to be passed around like this? How demeaning.

But Morax is stubborn stone, first and foremost. So he'll try to keep you there with him. Chain you to his abode, fearful of you leaving, since you talk about it so much.

Meanwhile, in the present, Zhongli is looking for you everywhere. But nothing. As if you vanished off the face of the earth. But there are little wisps of memory that are suddenly coming back. He sees a hair ribbon and thinks offhandedly that the one he gave to you was better—and Zhongli freezes. He never did. So why was he remembering you in it? Why is he seeing your shadow in the strangest of places? In his abode, shackled to his bed—he would never do such a thing, so why can get see you so clearly like this? On the banks of the Bishui river, of you staring into its waters, murmuring about how you want to go home—but he never visited Bishui with you. Zhongli remembers everything... So where are these sudden memories coming from?

Most importantly, where are you?

He's probably talking to cloud retainer to like

Zhongli: my baby left the abode for some no good no money no home bard

Cloud retainer: one remembers when little ganyu left to the harbor and now one has shenhe who hasn't left there's still a chance my lord

Zhongli: you're right I can either dispose of that no good dirty bard that is barbatos or just keep my little one in liyue

Cloud retainer: I mean sure my lord but shenhe just stays in order to not start a massacre and I want her to at least leave from time to time

Ooh now we're getting into less funny overprotective dad and more scary territory with a snapped zhongli. (I’m not gonna go the very very dark route because that’s a little too close to not funny things, so.) but yes, every time he looks at venti, it’s just… guizhong died for this?? piece of shit???? to touch my child????

i can just imagine zhongli standing in guili plains or sitting on that stone table near cloud retainer’s abode, eyes distant as he reminiscences over the past. Something something osmanthus wine, but then he gets so angry thinking about the marriage/little dragon leaving the nest that he just. crushes a cup into splinters accidentally without even realizing, until cloud retainer scolds him it.

for zhongli, I think it’d be hard to look at his child and realize, oh. they're not a child anymore. he doesn’t have to act so paternal all the time. I mean, if we look at canon, he only just recently gave up his role as geo archon. the man has a problem with letting things go.