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In Snezhnaya, time is a rather sparse thing. Though Ajax supposes the same can be said about anywhere, really. Liyue, where mora is constantly on the run. Sumeru, where chasing an academic breakthrough doesn’t leave room for much else. Fontaine, where inventors have to juggle innovation and demand in one hand.
All three dull in comparison to the nation that doesn’t allow you to stand still, that constantly has you on your feet in order to stave off encroaching hypothermia. Everyone is busy; from brawny stevedores, to nimble business men, to the Tsaritsa herself. Waste even a singular moment, and it’s your downfall.
He doesn’t mind it though, the busyness. To live is to have things to do, whether that means working a slum job in the crannies of the city or being a harbinger with the world under your thumb. There’s nothing more maddening than staying still, lazing around when the sky's the limit. Leisure is earned, not given.
Has he earned this, though?
Ajax looks down at his stomach, at the arms wrapped around him. Thoma’s breath is warm in his ear and he can’t find it in him to mind the faint, unintelligible mummers that he’s suddenly privy to.
Sun peeks out from the horizon and pours into their bedroom, courtesy of a window neither of them remembered to close. He’s watched the sky go from a murky, star-splotched indigo all the way to a much lighter, purple-to-orange gradient. Just how long has he been lying here, eyeing the night as it grows old, joining its wait to be overtaken by a young and vibrant dawn?
The more the sun continues to rise, the more he can make of their humble abode. He sees Thoma’s desk in the corner and discerns what lays on top of it: reports, notes, and letters that peek out of envelopes, their Sneznhayan postage stamps too small to see but Ajax knows for certain that they’re there.
Then, he sees the birthday gift he bought sitting on their nightstand. Thoma had made a joke about wanting to have the first ever harpastum, even if that meant having to loot a museum or pick-pocket an archon or whatever obtaining such an integral part of Mondstadter history entailed. The idea stuck in Ajax’s mind for months, growing louder the closer January creeped by.
So he found a guy who knew a guy who knew an auctioneer, and soon enough he had an ancient relic on his person that was ready to be shipped to the other side of the world. Granted it hadn’t been the first, not even the second or third or tenth, but it still predates both of them by at least a couple hundred years. Surely that would be enough.
More than, apparently, if the letter he’d gotten was to say anything. Long, filled to the brim with love, and so inherently Thoma. Ajax took it everywhere, read it like it was a mantra, didn’t dismiss it as a report or plans but instead as “a thank-you from someone precious to me,” and let the imaginations of whoever cared enough run wild; unbothered by the rumor that spread because it was entirely true. Tartaglia the Eleventh has a lover from overseas, one that has him so smitten that you’d mistake him for a hopeless romantic rather than the bloodborne warrior that strikes unparalleled terror into any and all who oppose him.
The next find is his coat hanging on the prick of a stand, accompanied by other articles of clothing that mainly belong to Thoma. It’s catching dust; thick fur unfit for the not at all below zero climate of their bedroom. Even when Inazuma does bear its icy fangs, betraying its tropical looks with a cold that seeps deep into his bones, Ajax finds that Thoma does its job better anyhow.
Contact beyond combat always seemed so odd, so unnecessary. Shaking hands and simillar pleasantries make sense, at least, but for the longest time Ajax couldn’t get his mind around other fields of intimacy: hugging, kisses, and sex especially. They all make him so stiff and confused and weirdly cold, like he’s hiking Sneznhaya’s tallest mountain, the one so high that you can catch a glimpse of the void beneath Teyvat’s giant, fake sky.
And those feelings persist whenever Thoma holds his hands, massages his wrists and kisses his knuckles. Trails down his neck and feels at his chest and stomach. Presses down on fresh wounds before curiously scraping his nails against scars of old.
But then it… dissipates, and suddenly Ajax isn’t in the abyss where even the faintest graze meant something was coming – or worse, waiting – ready to turn him into a mess of flesh and blood and guts and bone. Instead he’s in their house, or in the middle of the street, or near the estate, or in the teahouse, whatever, alive and well. Held by the man who loves him, not by cryptids who want to skin him alive.
The question strikes him again: has he earned this?
Has he earned Thoma?
He tells himself no, but that doesn’t feel right. Then yes, and that feels even worse.
So as he lays there, free of all the duties that typically make up his mornings, which feels equal parts uncomfortable and relieving, he settles on the usual answer: maybe.