Tyler, the creator

His clothes are pristine. Barely show a sign of your scuffle. He even wears a collar around his neck like he's a goddamned dog. The only sign that he's involved in the violence rather than a kindly passerby is blaring red and wet. Your blood on his gloves. It stains his palms and fingers in the way you'd always imagined a victim's blood might the hand of their killer.

“Are you going to cry?” His voice grates on your ears. Makes the ache of your nose worse. You think he might have broken it.

“Piss off,” your voice cracks when you speak and he laughs. He fucking laughs.

“You said yes and I did what I said I was going to.”

His eyes crinkle at the edges, but there's no light in them at all. Wine-dark and deep enough that you avert your gaze as soon as you catch his. If you don't, you might never stop looking. The rabbit-fast pace of your heart makes your nose thump with pain. Even with your eyes anywhere but on him, you can't spot an exit path.

“You told me your name and asked if I had a good reaction time!”

The bell at the Church tolls. There's no time to change. It seems like you'll be heading to prayer covered in your own blood.

“And you lied,” Lohen laughs louder. “I didn't, just so you know.”

You run toward him, to get past him and onto the main road, and he grips your shoulder painfully tight. Then he lets you go, and you speed up, feet thundering against cobblestone. You cast a hesitant look back.

The bastard is waving at you.

"I'll get you back someday," you whisper. You're not sure if it's a threat or a wish.

Two weeks later, you spot him on your way out of the Angel's Share. The moon is bright against the night sky, the stars a glittering tapestry, and Lohen leans against the bar wall like a creature out of the Abyss.

“What,” you spit. “Do you want from me.”

He tilts his head, all animalistic and curious. His eyes are wide and sharp. Remind you of the drink you've just had. Tangy grapes turned wine that went down sour. It courses through you still, making the evening pleasantly warm and hazy.

Your nose is still bruised from his punch. Droning crickets and patrolling knights and noisy drunks make the night feel far less dangerous than the quiet alley did. But something about him makes your hackles raise.

“Must I want something from you?” He asks instead of telling you anything upfront, smile as audible as it is visible. He has sharp canine teeth. You support yourself against the wall so you don't lose your balance. Drunkenness has never suited you in the way it does every other citizen of Mondstadt.

“You're staring like you do,” you answer. “And I don't know why else you'd be here, if not for a second try.”

“Hah,” his laugh is short, dry. “You know me better than most already! Am I so easy to read?”

You launch yourself at him. His grin only widens. Fucking reaction time— Barbara started panicking when you walked in, and what could you say? Oh, some knight punched me in the face because I got a little proud of myself for once? Lohen's laughter is as sickening now as it was then.

His knee finds your gut. Your nails find his cheeks. You spit bile and wine onto his clothes as you feel skin give way underneath your fingertips. A hard shove down, and the stone street is against your back, or your back is against it, and minty hair dangles in front of your face, smelling nothing like the plant. He stinks of sweat and iron.

“Screw you,” you shout into his face. Someone from the bar opens the door. Lohen drags you, you think, because the light doesn't reach your eyes.

“Stop fighting or I'll stop you myself.” The stranger says. Their voice is warm. Deep. A comfort as you lie on the cold ground, nauseous, dizzy, blood pooling where you've scratched. There is no response and the door closes.

Lohen punches you in the face again, and then he's hoisting you up by the arms, laughing still.

Freak.

“Are you sure I'm the only one who wanted that?” He sounds barely out of breath, and doesn't even flinch when you vomit all over his shoes.

Three days later, Lohen shows up at your door covered in blood. His face is still bruised, scratched like a cat was trying to kill him, but he's smiling.

You are not sure of how he knows where you live. Knights privileges, maybe. You watch as he drips all over the cobblestone and a little on your wooden floor, and you consider trying to kill him right then and there.

“Hello,” he says, raspy. “I was hunting, oh, sorry, I mean— tracking down a band of escaped Treasure Hunters.”

You swallow the bile that threatens to rise. Try not to think of how you threw yourself at him like you could have won. A murderer on your doorstep who punched you in the face twice. Barbatos must hate you specifically.

“And?”

“And I was wondering if I could teach you some tricks on how to not end up like them.”

You try to close the door and he grabs the side of it, holds it open. You push harder and it doesn't give a single damned inch.

“It'd be good for you,” he says, all chipper. You eye the hilt of a blade at his belt. You thought knights considered it immoral to fight with anything but a sword. But of course this one doesn't. Assaulting a civilian in broad daylight, and all. Even if you'd technically said yes. Even if you'd jumped at his throat later.

“You aren't giving me a choice,” you say.

“I always have a choice,” Lohen's voice, usually all light and sweet twists into something sharp, something like a blade. “You could end up like that, if you wanted.”

You close the door.

A few seconds pass. You do not hear him walk away. There are no weapons in your house, no tools to defend yourself with, only your body.

A memory strikes you, unbidden; Lohen on the ground due to nothing but surprise, the way he'd dragged you away from the light of the bar, safety just out of reach.

You open the door. His answering smile makes your blood turn to ice. It doesn't look like he expected anything else.

Four months later, you are knocking down wooden stands with as much force as you can muster. The sound as they fall hurts your ears, and you can't quite tell if the violent thumping noise is the rush of your pulse or the training sword smacking into cloth.

Lohen watches from the side with a dull expression. You don't know how long he's been standing there, aren't sure of when he arrived, but you're duly ignoring him. Training is exhausting. You're no knight. And yet…

“Stop,” he says. You don't flinch. Your grip tightens on the hilt of your sword.

He walks toward you with a casual pep, little capelet bouncing in the breeze, and a bruise still healing over his chin. There is a sword in his hand. Not his favored weapon, you've learned. The polearm or the dagger or the poison— he hasn't used a ranged weapon of his own choice in years.

“How long has it been since we practiced together, again? I swear, it's been ages since I've had a good fight!”

You roll your eyes. You put up little struggle next to knights.

“Two days,” you say.

Lohen laughs something ugly and charming. “Two days too long, clearly!”

A gloved hand comes to rest between your shoulders. There is still blood on them. He never washed it out. He never does. It could be yours, or it could be the treasure hunters’, or it could be his own. You don't know which option you favor. His hand is cool where it touches you, even through the cloth.

“Your form is off,” he says, smiling. “Do I not train you hard enough?”

You stiffen, and his hand presses harder, hard enough that you stumble and have to regain your footing by jumping a few paces.

His eyes are shadowed despite the light of the setting sun. You can't quite read him. You think you thought you could, when you met him, but now every expression slips between your fingers like powdered milk. Spoilt. Rotten.

You raise your sword to position. He grabs a training lance from the rack and puts his sword, sharp and deadly, down on the ground beside it.

Ah. He's going serious on you. For once.

The sight makes you swallow and you find that your own spit feels like swallowing a toad. Nerves bundle up. Your fingers shake. Your stomach hollows. Bastard knows how to frighten you.

He says nothing as he pounces on you, legs kicking out to sweep your feet from under you, and it is practice and luck combined that means you avoid it. A hard blow from up above makes you have to block with both hands, one on the hilt and one on the blade, wood splintering into your skin.

“Come on,” he says, his rasp somewhere between laughter and a sigh. “Are you going to risk that with a real weapon? Stupid, but brave…”

You thrust up a knee, aiming for his stomach, and find a softer spot instead. He giggles, pained, and you don't know how to feel about how satisfied the wheeze in his breath makes you feel. His clothes do little to obscure his movements. Leaning over, hand on his polearm, all blue and white… He almost looks like a true knight.

You don't let pity get you. Don't let the pained look fool you. He's smiling through his wince. Lohen is a bastard, and you raise your sword high, aiming for the soft spot between neck and shoulder blade.

He blocks it with the wooden blade of his spear, fast and hard, hard enough that your foot kicks into his thigh and makes him fumble. It might leave a bruise.

“Nice one!” Lohen laughs, and you're surprised enough by his praise that you don't see the hand that grabs your throat coming at all.

It knocks you down flat. Familiarly so. His legs around your waist, knees tight like he's restraining a wild animal. His gloved fingers squeeze around your neck, just enough to make you struggle to breathe with how hard the exertion made you pant.

“But,” he starts, tilting his head, leaning down until the wispy bangs of his hair brush your skin. “Nice isn't good enough, you gotta want it to hurt me.”

His eyes are wide. Empty. Fucking wine-dark. You never noticed it before but he has a little mole underneath one of them. Once, you heard someone say that a mole like that signifies a life of hardship and tears. You've never seen his eyes water even a little.

“Okay,” you say just to fill the silence, to distract yourself. The bruise on your nose has healed long ago, but it lingers in your mind. “Wanting that is easy enough anyway.”

Lohen's smile twists into something so sharp you think it might be satisfied.

“We'll make a fighter out of you yet.”

Five hours later, you are sitting by his side in the infirmary. The blood has mostly been cleaned off by now, removed with more patches of cloth than you'd ever seen used in your life. It colored the water in the bucket a deep red.

Lohen, for his part in things, seems awfully happy. He kicks his legs back and forth despite the flesh wound on his calf, smiling so brightly that the white of his teeth rivals the white of the bandages wrapped around his head.

They're already staining. You think he might have a concussion, but Barbara swore he didn't.

They called her over because of the severity of the wounds. You tried not to meet her gaze when she asked who did it, what happened, who else got hurt. It was you and not you. It was you and the people you fought and really, that makes it all Lohen's fault.

If you'd been stronger, neither of you would have gotten hurt. If you'd never accepted the desire to get stronger, neither of you would have been there at all.

Nausea climbs your throat at the memory of slack expressions. Empty eyes. Sinew and bone.

“You're lost in thought,” Lohen says, chipper. He waves a hand in front of your face and you push it down with a groan. “Care to share?”

“Not really,” you mumble.

Your own wounds were treated last, because they weren't as severe. Scratches and cuts on your arms, a thin injury from a blade along your back. Lohen couldn't keep his eyes off of them when you'd first helped each other walk back. He'd stepped down hard on his own bleeding leg. Not even limping.

You swallow at the memory. Try not to think about what the bastard made you do— about the blood on your hands. His. Theirs. Your own.

“Did you not like it?” He asks, and you look at him to find his face awfully empty. Familiarly empty. The thought of him dead strikes you hard, like sickening lightning, and you shake your head just to clear it.

You clench your hands in your lap. Lohen takes them into his own, thumbs the calloused skin of your palm, brushing hard enough to make the scratches sting. Turned up like this, they look awfully normal. Like nothing has changed.

“You barely even did half of the work, I was the one wiping the floor with them,” he says, sounding not-quite-enthusiastic. Not like usual. “But there's nothing wrong with enjoying yourself when you're fighting to survive.”

You watch a knight pass by the open infirmary door. Armor shining in the light of the day. Weapon sheathed at their belt.

“I think we could've done it less…” Less what? With less mortal consequences?

Lohen laughs as you trail off. He sounds like himself again. You think his expression still looks off.

“That's the kinda mindset that gets you killed, and you won't even have lived enough to make your mercy worth it!”

You can't quite disconnect from the moment, can't think of the bodies, because his thumb presses harder into your palm. The sting keeps you tethered. Keeps you awake. Makes blood bubble to the surface.

You are alive because you killed. Lohen won't let you forget it.

Six days later, you find yourself in Lohen's small apartment. It's a single room on the upper story of a house where several knights live, with a small window that lets the sunlight in, and a view of the rolling fields outside Mondstadt's walls. You can even spot Dragonspine in the distance.

He'd explained to you that the room was on a rotating schedule amongst knights in his company, that whoever lived in it was whoever was stationed in Mondstadt at the time, and that someone else had lived in it for over a year while he'd been on the expedition.

“Is that why it's so clean?” You ask, half-joking, and he laughs but doesn't answer.

When you poke around, you find knives hidden under pillows on the couch-bed. It's a miracle you don't cut yourself by accident.

“I invite you here for dinner and you make fun of an apartment that's barely even mine,” he rolls his eyes. He's dressed more casually today than you've seen him in… Forever, you think. White and blue, but no pomp, no knightly symbols. Covered from head to toe.

Every so often he looks back at you from where he stands in the tiny kitchen, hair falling into his eyes. “You know perfectly well I keep my weapons sorted.”

“And your collection,” you say instead of pointing out the polearm hanging precariously above the rickety dinner table.

He nods, gives you a look you can't read. His smile is too soft. “And my collection.”

The smell of fish and cream permeates the apartment, warm and cloying. You lean back against the bed where you sit. It's softer than you thought it would be. Somehow you'd just assumed Lohen was the kind of masochistic idiot who slept on hard mattresses to prove something to himself.

“Taste test before I serve it or I'll make you lick it up from the floor,” he calls, and you rise, flicking him across the forehead. You never know if he might make good on it.

Only mostly serious, you ask a question that gets you the reward of a wink and then a shake of the head as you step toward his side. "Did you add anything weird to it? Poison, maybe?"

You grab for the spoon but he dips a finger into the boiling mixture and raises it to your mouth.

“What,” you say, but that's too much of an opening, clearly, and he stuffs it between your lips. You bite down like you're faced with a carrot, annoyance hot in your chest, and he winces, but doesn't pull back.

Slowly, biting harder all the while, you lick the cream from his finger. It tastes buttery and sweet. You let his finger go from between your teeth and watch as blood pools, marks visible on his pale skin like bruises on fruit. He's an apple nobody but you would ever pick, you think.

“It tastes fine,” you say, looking into his dark eyes to avoid looking at the marks. “But you're a real freak, you know that, right?”

Lohen's answering smile is more real than you've seen since the fight.

“I know,” he grins. Leans too far into your space. “Want to test out just how true that is?”

Seven months later, you are crouched in the tree at Windrise. The breeze is blowing leaves up from the undergrowth, rustling every branch with such noise that it hides your labored breathing.

Beneath you, a dark blue dot shadowed against the bright blue sky, Lohen approaches with his polearm in hand. This far up he looks like a rabbit on the ground, face twitching, hunched up like a prey animal ready to start running. You swallow the excitement. This has been months in the making. Over a year.

It is your test, to see how far you've come, how much his training has pushed you, and— and you want to prove that you're not going to take a single hit and go down. You'll rip his throat out today. Eat him alive.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he shouts, sing-song and delighted, and you curl so that the leaves will hide you better.

Your grip on your blade tightens. The leather handle brushes against the scars left over from the fight all those weeks ago. You don't think about it much anymore. It happened. You lived. Lohen lived.

All things considered, there were few better outcomes to have.

He steps further toward the tree, careful and quiet and if you hadn't been up here, you never would have seen him coming. His polearm is kept up just-so, ready to strike and yet never hitting the ground and telling you of his position.

You watch him tilt his head, looking around, and you can just about picture ears on his head darting toward every sound. You crouch lower.

A step more, and the position will be perfect. You don't even dare breathe. Too great a risk.

And then he looks right up at you.

And the bastard smiles.

It is entirely on impulse that you leap from the tree, blade outstretched— iron, sharp, a real threat —toward his neck. That little collar has pissed you off since you first met him. You are going to cut it off as you cut his throat.

That's how Lohen has trained you, after all. You even have the reaction speed to lean back when he swings the polearm toward you, just barely out of reach as it swims through the air in front of your nose.

“Fuck you, I fucking had you,” you say, and he laughs, swiping a leg toward you. “Fuck you!”

You jump up to avoid it, use your sword to balance and relish the satisfying feeling of a sharp edge sinking into soft dirt. A kick toward him has him staggering back, and then he stabs the polearm toward the arm you're leaning on, and you have to raise it so fast you nearly take your own eye out with the blade.

“It was a good try,” he says, panting, and you punch him with your free hand. You think you might have broken his nose. He doesn't so much as wince, just smiles wider, using the long handle of his spear to take out a leg from under you.

Fighting with Lohen feels like dancing, now. It's a test too. It always has been. But you dodge under and over the long, hard swings of his spear, and every time he tries to get close you use your blade to drive him away.

“A good try,” he says again, ducking just under the swing of your sword, and you swear you can see that you take a few hairs off his head— and then he rises, forehead meeting your chin. You gasp, lean back, a hand where it hurts, but you spot where he's going to go next, and… “But not good enough.”

This time, when he makes for your throat with a hand hidden just underneath the shadow his spear casts on the ground, you grab his wrist and twist it around.

He falls along with you, as you push your elbow against his back, right into soft flesh. His polearm goes careening, and you hold your sword high. When he lands facedown in the grass, you're on his back, digging the blade into the ground right beside his cheek.

You pant. Lohen wheezes beneath you. You can feel the uneven breaths where you sit, both of you shaking from the fight. His hair covers much of his face, but he tilts his head, letting the sharp edge of your sword cut into his skin, and meets your gaze.

“That was great,” he says, sucking in a harsh breath. Blood from his nose runs down into his mouth. Stains his teeth. “You've learned how to take a punch, and how to dish one out..!”

The hand trapped between you and his back wriggles, and you tighten your grip. Sitting down, you can feel where your ribs will bruise, where your body will ache tomorrow. It doesn't matter, though. You won.

He runs cold, but when you tilt the blade a little closer, digging a little further into his flesh, you can see that his pale skin is warming up. Blushing red.

“You gonna get up and let me go for a second try?” Lohen asks, sounding awfully excited about the thought. “Or are you gonna take your time making me pay?”

The answer is clear as day to both of you. Sometimes he asks questions just to feel the sting of a denial.

You have several months of things to make him suffer for.

It takes only a few seconds of consideration before you lift him by the hair, bringing the sword to his throat. The blood from his nose and cheek drips onto it. By now, both the edge and the flat of the blade are red with his blood.

Carefully, without remorse, you dig it under the collar, and strip it off like you would when unleashing a trapped dog.

Lohen's giggle sounds hoarse, muted, and the way he sniffles could fool anyone else into thinking he was crying. But you can see the smile. Know it's only the blood. You don't know how far you'd have to go to get him to sob, but you think you might want to find out.

You yank him up higher, dig your fingers into the thick of his hair and clench around the roots, and feel the way he fights against your pull. Just to feel the ache, you bet. Bastard. Freak.

This close you can look him in the eyes, see the little mole under one of them, the long arcs of his lashes. The blood on his teeth.

“You don't seem too upset to have lost,” you say aimlessly, considering what you might do, what revenge you can take. You sit up further, holding down the arm on his back with your weight, and tilt the hand you're using to hold the sword so close that you're nearly taking out his eye just so you can brush the skin underneath it.

Soft. Too soft for someone like him, you think, and then he's leaning up into you and kissing you with too much teeth. The taste of his blood is metallic and you're sure you must look awfully shocked because he's laughing again, biting your lips, all coppery stench and impulse.

Lohen's tongue swipes across your teeth, and you're not sure what possesses you to do it— whatever drove you to agree to training with him in the first place, perhaps —but you lick against the inside of his cheek like you're tasting fresh kill. There is a bite wound there, biting his tongue doesn't seem like his thing, but now that you're thinking back on it…

“You fucking freak,” you spit, laughing at the red on his cheeks, laughing at the way the memory of his lust for violence mixes with the memory of him in his kitchen, cooking you a meal. “You love me!”

Then he kisses you again, sharp and hungry and painful, biting down your lips to your chin and to your neck. It hurts like you imagine being bitten by a desperate animal might. The funny part is just that he keeps leaning up into you, keeps chasing after you even when you rise.

“Don't stop there,” he half-groans and half-wheezes, out of breath. You hit him over the head and he makes a miserable, delighted noise.

It probably makes you a freak too, you're realizing, that you think this act of hurting each other is a fitting reward for the past year of dancing around each other. You don't have much time to think about it, though, because Lohen is kicking back at you to upheave you from where you sit.

It takes maneuvering and strength and a little bit of luck for you to remain sitting, but you're on the ground instead of on top of him, and his hands find your shoulders with surprising speed. He's shaking, but you think that's excitement, and his fingers squeeze so tight that it hurts.

Your knee is between his thighs where his cock is hard in his pants, your teeth are on his now-bare neck, biting into pristine skin. His fingers are calloused under the gloves he almost always wears, but here he's soft, delicate, a word you'd never use to describe Lohen otherwise.

“Too easy," you mumble, and he bites into his glove to drag it off, then digs a hand under your shirt. He scratches down your back with his nails like a wildcat, and you dig your knee up so that you're both wincing. He's grinding against you with no rhythm, and you're no better where you sit on his thigh, and dully you think that you're both really fucking lucky that there's a festival in Dornman Port and most people are far away from Windrise. It means that when Lohen lets out a sound somewhere between a keen and a mocking laugh at the way your hips stutter, you don't have to stuff your fingers into his mouth to keep him quiet. You think he might want you to do that, though, because he kisses your palm on your way to burying it in his hair. The palm with the scars from your fight all that time ago. The sight makes you swallow thick and bitter. "Fuckin'," you start, gasping out when he grinds his thigh harder against you. "Sappy bastard." "Can't you see how delighted," he breathes against you, cool despite the heat of the situation, the closeness of your bodies, the way his blood still runs down his face in warm rivulets. Cryo vision. "I am, that you've figured out how to be cruel?"

"Gross," you say, and he laughs hard enough that he smears the blood on his face against your skin. You're both covered in it. It's everywhere, and you both stink of iron and dirt and arousal, and you can't help but laugh along with him. His eyes are impossibly dark. Still that same color that gets stuck in your head, that lingers when you close your own.

Wine-dark.

Behind him, your sword lays in the grass, green and grey dotted with red. You kiss him this time, and fumble for the hilt, and... There, you have it. His eyes are closed, long dark lashes fluttering against his pale, bloodied skin. You bite his lip, lick the open wound, and press the blade of the sword to his throat. He laughs. The edge cuts into his skin just-so. His smile is wide and alive and joyous. "You've got it out for me," Lohen says like you've promised him the world, out of breath and hard against you, leaning further so a single movement would cut his head from his body.

It's the merciless press of your blade against his skin and the cruel, slow grind that does him in, and with your faces so close together, you can see the satisfied look on his face as he comes with a frenzied giggle.

You don't stop moving, not when the grip of his fingers and the harsh scratching makes you grit your teeth, and you shake on his thigh as if the risk of slitting his throat with one awkward movement wasn't hanging right above your heads.

"Guess you really did screw me in the end," Lohen laughs, and you roll your eyes, dropping the sword at your side. You brush your finger across his neck. The blood pools and mixes together until you can't tell which of you was the first to start bleeding.

It takes a good few minutes until either of you speak again, but you don't bother counting them.

"...Satisfied with your revenge yet?" Lohen asks, breathing hard. Grinning.

You hum. As if you were considering it. Let the silence settle in, nothing but your breathing and the breeze to occupy it. Watch his face fall from a smile to an empty frown. The hollow nothingness that settles in after the joy. It'd be a cruel fate to condemn anyone to.

But you have the choice, now. You always will.

You look him over. His white clothes, knightly as ever, are stained with blood. Discolored by grass. A blush dusts his bleeding cheeks, there's a little cut on his throat that's sure to scar. His lips are red and wounded. He looks debauched. It was your hand that did this to him. It's a nice thought.