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The ship rocked ceaselessly, cradled by waves that held no comfort. Each lurch against the sea sent pain surging through Childe’s battered body. Shards of agony threaded through cracked ribs and bruised lungs. He’d long since grown familiar with pain, but with the sheer amount of time he'd spent with his Foul Legacy activated the sensation lingered and festered, spreading like rot in the hollow spaces of his bones.
Beyond the porthole of his cabin, the sky blurred into a dull, indifferent gray.
He was fourteen again.
Lost in the Abyss.
The darkness pressed in on all sides, thick and suffocating. He charged foward, but never advanced toward the loght in the distance. There were creatures at the edge of his vision. A primal, gnawing malice reminded him he was one of them now. To live here, you had to eat. So, he ripped and tore his way through them all, before they could sink their teeth into him first.
And still, through the frenzy, a voice reached him.
“Tartaglia.”
Soft. Familiar. Human.
“Tartaglia, stay with us.”
His body jolted in the present. A cold cloth touched his brow. Distant voices murmured… Fatui medics, probably. They spoke with the cautious optimism reserved for soldiers clinging to life. Childe was almost amused.
Another wave struck the hull, and the world slipped again.
Now it was the Narwhal.
Childe was fourteen again.
Small. Raw. Hands blistered from frost and fear. His knuckles were scraped, bloodied. He was holding a rusted knife with a chipped edge that had once belonged to a hunter in Morepesok, stolen from a half-buried supply shed before he vanished into the woods. It felt far too big in his grip then.
The water lapped at his knees, and with it came a blistering cold, numbing everything but the wild beat of his heart.
The sea around him churned, dark and endless, impossibly deep. Then, from beneath, something moved.
He gritted his teeth, trying to stay still, trying not to cry, but the sob rose anyway. A child’s breathless fear, caught in his throat like a hook.
Then the water swelled around him, dragged him under-
And when he opened his eyes again, he was no longer a boy.
He was something else.
Foul Legacy encased him, armor fused with abyssal instinct, breathing with him, through him. The mask was cracked and his skin felt torn open so something other could force its way inside.
The primordial sea surrounded him, choked with shadows and pressure. The pinprick of light was gone, the darkness pressing down on him from all sides like gravity. And he wasn’t holding a rusted knife anymore, claws tearing through the water with the force of a submerged cannon. His every movement twisted the current around him into whirlpools.
How long had he been here?
Days?
Weeks?
A lifetime?
There were no stars or seabed for him to find his bearings. Only depth, pressure, and it.
The narwhal loomed, a cathedral of swirling flesh and fractals, its horn jagged like an ancient, broken sword. Its eye shone like a lantern in the deep, impassive and old.
And it knew him.
Their dance was slow at first. Like two beats circling one another in reverence or disgust.
Then it surged, fast as a god’s wrath, teeth bared wide, and Childe met it without hesitation, snarling through his mask.
They clashed.
The water boiled from the force of the blows. He dodged its horn by inches, felt the wake shear past his face, tore into the underbelly with a spinning kick that left bloody trails coiling upward like ink.
The narwhal screamed, not with a voice, but a psychic blast that rattled through his bones, shaking loose some distant part of him that still remembered home. Still remembered his name.
It wasn’t Childe in the deep. It wasn’t even Ajax. It was something else entirely. Rage and duty. Weapon and will.
But beneath the endless blows, beneath the scars and blood and dark, something smaller beat on inside him like a heart inside a shell.
He was still that boy.
Still fourteen.
Still scared, clutching a dull knife, face-to-face with otherworldly horrors wondering if the world had already ended.
He tore through the narwhal’s eye, and it regenerated. He gouged its belly, and it coiled around him, constricting. On and on. An endless war.
He couldn’t tell if he was winning or just surviving, or if any time had truly passed at all.
There was only the fight.
He came to with a gasp, lungs dragging in air like water. Salt stung his tongue. A medic at his bedside startled upright.
“You’re awake! Good. Here, hold still.”
“How long?” His voice scraped out, rough and broken. The medic paused her fumbling and cut her eyes to his briefly.
“Three days since we left Fontaine. You’ve got a fever, and there's still a high risk for infection. Honestly, some of us thought you were going to die a couple days ago. We uh... started drafting a report.”
“By all means, don't sugarcoat it, ” He grumbled with a roll of his eyes. The room swirled dangerously. So no more rolling his eyes, no problem. He breathed heavily through his mouth until his vision settled. “I truly missed that sweet Snezhnayan bluntness, keep it coming.”
The tension in the room lingered, heavy as the scent of antiseptic and saltwater. The ship groaned again, carrying them ever onward through the night.
Then, almost like she was trying not to disturb the silence, she said, with quiet assurance, “You’ll be alright. Just hold on a little longer.”
Childe blinked slowly, heavy-lidded. Fever still had him tight in its grip, blurring the edges of everything. But he managed to turn his head, just slightly, and look at her for the first time.
“You’re new,” he rasped, the words rough but clear enough to make her pause. His lip quirked, the hint of a smirk curling through the exhaustion. “How’d you snag a retrieval mission this early? Pull a name from a hat?”
The medic blinked at him, startled. Her brows jumped before she flushed, suddenly flustered.
“That's not- no! I volunteered,” she said, almost too quickly, then crossed her arms, clearly regretting the reaction. “And this isn't just a retrieval mission. It’s a high-priority medical escort. You’re…,” she caught herself and shifted awkwardly, lowering her voice, “You’re kind of important.”
He chuckled once, low and dry. “Tough luck.”
“You said it,” she muttered, but by then his eyes were already slipping closed again, lashes resting against fever-warm cheeks. His breathing deepened, and he slipped away once more.
The wind smelled like chimney smoke and pine needles.
Laughter echoed from somewhere nearby, light and familiar. Teucer’s voice, calling for someone to hurry up. Anton’s groan of complaint. Tonia’s higher laugh, bright and mischievous.
He started walking, slowly, through the frost-flecked grass, and the lake shimmered just ahead, perfectly frozen. There were no monsters here, no battle to be won. Just that glowing orange light in the windows of the house beyond the trees, the outline of snowmen in the yard, the sound of boots stomping on the porch.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” someone called…his mother’s voice, maybe. Distant, softened by the snow.
He smiled without meaning to, something small and rare.
Behind him, he felt someone watching.
A hand suddenly clapped on his shoulder- calloused and familiar. The weight of it was grounding. The warmth of it almost startling. Somehow, he knew it was his father. That distant impression of strength he used to reach for when the night was cold and he was still small enough to cry without shame.
The hand squeezed his shoulder once.
He closed his eyes and leaned into it.
“Home…”he murmured, voice barely audible, cracked around the edges.
The medic paused mid-motion, her fingers still holding a length of gauze half-wrapped around his ribs. She looked up from her work, her brows knitting as she studied the man stretched out before her.
He looked nothing like the rumors.
His face was far too young to belong to a monster, flushed with fever, framed in damp auburn curls plastered to his brow. His skin was deathly pale beneath his dressings, lips split and dry. Angry purple bruises ghosted his torso like ink stains. The stitches on his left flank had already torn once from tossing in fever dreams. The ones along his shoulder might not hold through the night, she noted in consternation.
She exhaled, rubbing her thumb once across the cloth before gently pressing it to his side again.
He flinched in his sleep but didn’t wake.
The medic finished securing the gauze, now stained faintly red again. She clicked her tongue, not unkindly, and went to gather fresh supplies.
“You’re not there yet,” she said aloud, though he couldn’t hear her. “But we’re getting you there, Lord Harbinger.”
She sat back in her stool, giving him a long look. He looked somewhat peaceful now, expression hovering between pain and soft contentment.
“…We’ll take you home.”
The Fatui had moved fast, as they always did. Within a day of docking at the edge of Morepesok’s icy harbor, they had requisitioned an old fishery near the outskirts of town. The inside now resembled a makeshift infirmary. It was sterile, cold, and lined with supply crates and steel-framed cots that looked absurd against the hand-hewn wood walls.
And the people of Morepesok? They stayed far away.
Even now, after all these years, the memory of Ajax’s return(young, wild-eyed, and wrong ) still haunted them. Sons who bore the claw marks from the day he’d lashed out. Fathers who’d searched the woods for a boy and found something else. Mothers angled themselves away when he passed by to whisper his name.
They hadn’t known what the Abyss was- still don't, since any time he tried to explain they acted like he'd gone insane. Even they'd known what crawled back from the woods wasn’t normal.
So they kept their distance.
As they always had.
And Childe, Ajax , preferred it that way.
He lay in a cot at the far end of the infirmary, partially upright, bandages swathing his torso like armor. His breathing was shallow. The dull ache in his chest was constant, though manageable. It was the silence he hated. Times like this, those half-formed whispers from the Abyss, grew louder in his mind and the phantom tug of its gravity dragged him downward.
Familiar foosteps echoed through the hallway, and Childe fixed his expression to look more alert.
His mother entered first, a woven shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders, clutching the hands of his siblings. Teucer and Anton's eyes were wide and frightened, Tonia’s gaze unreadable. Childe’s stomach twisted.
“You shouldn’t have brought them,” he said quietly, voice like scraped frost.
His mother flinched at the sound of it. “They wanted to-”
“No.” He shook his head. “Take them home. Please.”
The ache in his ribs grew sharper as Tonia's eyes narrowed, mouth set in a soft frown. Childe couldn’t tell if she was angry with him turning they away or just sad.
His mother opened her mouth to protest, but a low voice cut through the tension.
“Go.”
Childe’s father stepped in from behind them, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Take them. I’ll stay.”
Before she reached the door, Tonia stopped. Her hand slipped from their mother’s, and she lingered in the doorway for a breath longer than needed. Then, with her chin tucked down and her fingers tightening around the hem of her sleeve, she turned back and walked toward Childe’s bedside.
Childe watched her approach, already suspecting where this was going.
“You’re… you’re coming home for dinner,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question. Her voice was soft, but her stare was insistent.
He blinked. “Tonia…”
“Whenever you come home, you always come straight back home and we all sit to eat dinner together. You missed yesterday.” She glanced down. “So, are you coming tonight?”
Childe exhaled slowly, a tired edge to his smile. “I might have to postpone, princess. The doctors say I need rest. And this,” He gestured vaguely at the bandages and the dull aches beneath them, “is going to take a bit more time.”
Tonia’s lips pressed into a thin line. She looked back toward their mother, hesitated, then looked at Childe again.
“What about tomorrow?”
Their mother turned halfway back. “Tonia, sweetheart, you heard your brother. Come h-”
“I said tomorrow,” she repeated, louder this time. There was a quiver in her tone, but she didn’t back down.
Childe looked at her for a long moment, then gave a tired, crooked smile. “You’ve gotten more stubborn.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you must have gotten slower!” Tonia hmphed with an exaggerated sniff and pointed at the thick swaths of bandages.
“Tonia!” Their mother gasped in disapproval, but cut herself when she saw Childe throw his head back on the pillow and give a full-bodied laugh.
“You've gotten more demanding too, but alright you win. Tomorrow.”
She stepped closer, raising her pinky without asking. Her hand trembled slightly, but she held it out anyway.
He linked his pinky with hers, their fingers hooking with the solemnity only siblings could offer.
“You make a pinkie promise, you keep it all your life.
You break a pinkie promise, I throw you on the ice.
The cold will kill the pinkie that once betrayed your friend,
The frost will freeze your tongue off so you never lie again.”
Tonia recited the rhyme faithfully, and her grip tightened briefly- just enough to seal the deal.
Then, without another word, she stepped back. Their mother reached for her hand again, this time guiding her gently toward the hallway. Before the door shut, Childe caught a glimpse of Anton and Teucer waiting outside, both holding their hands up for Tonia to high-five eagerly.
She gave them both small, proud smacks and the door closed softly behind them. Then it was just Childe and his father.
It had been over a decade since they’d spoken alone.
Childe’s father sat in the rickety chair beside his bed. The wood creaked beneath him. For a long while, he said nothing. He only stared at the floor, thumb pressed between his brows, massaging the space as if trying to force the tension from the room with his fingers.
“…So, do you still get those headaches?” he asked finally, voice soft and hoarse.
His father blinked, clearly startled by the question. “That’s not something you need to worry about.”
Childe let out a short, humorless breath. “You used to rub your brow like that when you were trying not to yell. Or after one of the younger kids broke something. Or when I-” he stopped himself. Swallowed hard. “It was always there. Is it still?”
His father didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched.
“I didn’t come here to complain to you about my head,” he said, almost awkwardly. “I just wanted to talk.”
Childe turned his head to look at the wall. “You haven’t wanted to talk to me in years.”
“I know we don’t see eye to eye,” his father said, his voice gravelled with age and something heavier. “And I know I’ve made bad decisions. About you. For you.”
Childe’s lips curled into something like a smile, sharp and bitter.
“Enlisting me the Fatui was the best thing you could’ve done,” he cut in. “Either I put that anger to work for Her Majesty or I would've torn the house apart from the inside- maybe even moved on to the town. It was a smart choice.”
His father gave a slow sigh, dragging his hand down over his face.
“It may’ve been the smartest,” he said, voice quieter, “but that doesn’t mean it was the best.”
The quiet was heavy now, thick with old resentment, shame, and all the things left unsaid for too long. Even the ocean beyond the walls seemed to pause its rhythm.
Childe let the silence sit. He was used to it.
But he was tired. And for once , maybe for the first time in a long time… he didn’t want to hold everything in.
He shifted slightly, wincing at the pain to look at the flakes of crusted blood beneath his fingernails- at his bandaged hands, his bandaged everything . He turned back toward his father, his eyes glinting with something dark, when his father finally gaze once more.
“Tell me… do they know?”
His father’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb,” Childe said, sharper now. “Tonia. Anton. Teucer. Do they know who I really am? What I really do when I disappear for months? That their big brother Ajax is the Eleventh Harbinger?”
A beat passed. His father didn’t look away.
“…Tonia knows,” he said at last, voice even. “And Anton’s not stupid. He’s put things together.”
Childe inhaled sharply, the weight of that confirmation hitting harder than he expected. He has suspected for awhile that "Ajax the Toymaker" wasnt really going to cut with Tonia anymore, and Anton was remarkably intuitive for his age, so while it wasnt ideal, he wasn't surprised.
“And Teucer?”
“No,” his father said, firmer now. “We won’t tell him.”
A pause.
Childe’s next words came low and cold. “So you’re keeping up the lie.”
“It’s your lie, Ajax,” his father snapped, with a flash of uncharacteristic steel. “You built it. You chose it. You keep sending letters with stories about toy shops and explorers. You play the part. If you want it to end, you end it. But don’t you dare act like it’s your family’s job to carry your weight for you.”
That landed like a slap.
Childe’s hands curled against the sheets, knuckles white. “Funny,” he said with a sharp-edged smile, voice beginning to tremble with fury. “You want to talk about carrying weight? You want to lecture me about responsibility?”
He struggled to sit up, gritting his teeth as pain tore through his abdomen. “You’d know plenty about responsibility, wouldn’t you? You didn’t look back once when Pulcinella took me. You didn’t even ask where they were taking me, did you? You just watched him put his hand on my shoulder and lead me away like some… some beast bought at an auction!”
“Ajax-”
“No,” he spat, voice rising. “You want to know what real responsibility looks like? It looks like me sending home Fatui money stained with blood so Mama can keep the fire going, so the kids don’t go hungry, so you don’t have to work yourself into an early grave. And you took it. Every coin! I’ve never heard you say no.”
His eyes burned now, his chest heaving with the effort to stay upright as every stitch in his side screamed at him.
“Ajax, stop-”
He tried to rise further, to snarl something worse, something pointed and vile enough to make his father give up this sham of a conversation, when his body gave out with a deep jolt of pain that radiated through his spine. He let out a strangled gasp and collapsed back onto the bed, breath hitching, vision spotting.
“Dammit,” he rasped, cursing himself for the weakness. “Stupid…”
His father had risen halfway out of his chair in alarm. “I’m calling the nurse!”
“Sit down,” Childe said, voice hollow. “We aren't done yet.”
His father obeyed. Slowly. Wordlessly, he sat, hands folded together tightly between his knees.
The seconds dragged out.
When Childe finally spoke again, his voice was quieter. Not calmer but deeper. Hoarser, as though he was digging through his chest to find the words.
“I have to ask,” he said. “Why didn’t you believe me?”
His father blinked rapidly at him, confused. “Believe you about what?”
“When I came back from the Abyss. I told you I was down there for months. Not days. I was telling the truth.” Childe’s throat tightened. “But you looked at me like I was lying. Like you’d already decided that the son you knew was gone! And what came back… wasn’t him.”
His father’s brows drew together, his jaw tightening.
“I was a child,” Childe continued, the words tumbling out now, raw and desperate. “I was scared. I needed you to believe me! Instead, you stared at me like I was some- some thing you'd let in your house and didn't know how to get rid of. You’ve looked at me that way ever since.”
The old man’s mouth opened, but no words came.
“Why do you call me your son,” Childe pressed, “if you still treat me like something to be respected from a distance? Like I’m just another Harbinger. Not your Ajax .”
Emotion choked his next breath. He looked away.
His father was quiet for a long time.
Then, slowly, he spoke.
“I didn’t know what to do when you came back,” he said, voice uneven. “You were… changed. Your eyes looked older. You barely slept. Sometimes you seemed as though you were seeing something no one else could.”
He rubbed his hand down his face again. “I believed you, but I didn’t understand it. And it scared me. And I hated that it scared me.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I wanted to believe you’d just come home and your mother and I would give you a talking to ablut wandering away from you siblings.That things would go back to the way they were. But they didn’t. And I didn’t know how to handle that. I didn’t know how to be your father anymore.”
“You still could have tried,” Childe whispered.
“I know,” his father murmured. “I should have.”
He reached out again, and this time his grip was gentler, more certain.
“I wasn’t afraid of you. I was afraid of failing you. Of making things worse. So I stayed quiet. And that silence got longer. Until I didn’t know how to bridge it anymore.”
Childe closed his eyes. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything.
Then: “Well I guess this is a good enough start. Only took you, what? Nine years?”
His father gave a tired smile. “You still know how to make an old man feel guilty.”
Childe smiled faintly, eyes still closed. “It’s a gift.”
His father’s hand squeezed his.
“I’m sorry, Ajax.”
There was a pause. Not long. Just enough for something fragile to settle in the space between them.
“I can’t undo anything. But please,” he continued, eyes fixed on the floorboards, “just… come home more. When you aren't half dead, preferably. Your mother misses you.Anton would also appreciate it you showed your face more." He heard his father huff afrontedly. "He's at that age where he doesn't think it's "cool" to hang out with your younger brother. Damn near claws at the walls to get away from him."
He focused on the feeling of his father's rough fingers against his. Both of their hands were ice cold.
Childe hesitated.
Then, slowly, he tightened his grip back. Just a little.
“I'll try.”