When he opens his eyes, it is to see her looking back at him, and his breath catches in his throat.
She’s breathtaking, as always.
He cannot breathe, mesmerised almost, as he raises his hand to reach for hers, only to stop a hairs’ breath away, lingering, hovering, wanting.
It feels like suffocating, except no one has ever managed to catch him by the throat throughout his millennia of years alive. The closest he would compare it would be to those ages sitting beside the riverbank with her, when she laughed at him, with him, and played him by the fiddle in a way no one else had managed or dared to.
Oh, and how Morax aches for those times past.
(this is sacrilege, this is heresy, this is pure blasphemy - and yet he cannot bring himself to stop)
He presses a hand on the glass, greedily drinking in her soft braids, the plumpness of her cheeks, the soft curls behind her ear, the glaze lily set upon her hair-
She doesn’t smile at him, as always, but that is fine. The cold downturn of her lips is something he is almost used to, something he even craves with something that might have approached degeneracy despite the guilt, the shame, the pain and longing and grief.
Her eyes are a cold, dead amber. They are not her eyes, so Morax closes his own, unable to bear face reality, unable to see those eyes looking at him from her face.
He leans his forehead against the mirror, and tries to pretend she is something more than a ghost and a mirage conjured by a delusional god in his throes of madness.
Morax cannot afford to be something less than a God, than the Archon that watches over Liyue. He must be unyielding like stone and carry out his duty, as he had promised her during their final moments together. He wouldn’t let her death mean nothing less than she deserves
(howhowhow, nothing can ever justify her death, nothing can ever possibly be equivalent to her parting, HOW- this isn’t enough, this can’t possibly ever be enough, he must continue working, improving, raise them, protect them-)
But sometimes, sometimes, Morax aches. And-
And-
Only in the privacy of his territory does he dare face the darkness within him, the fierce longing that borders on what might have been insanity or madness that tears at him endlessly.
Only when the fear of forgetting becomes to strong, when he is too fearful he might forget with the passing of the years (decades, centuries, and another millennia) does he dare shift and look upon his friend - amber eyes and emotionless and just a ghost - in order to remember.
Morax cannot forget. He refuses to forget. He must not forget.
This might be what destroys him, someday.
(I miss you, my friend.)
(…Guizhong.)
The mirror doesn’t answer him, of course.
…………
aka inspired by Tamamo no Mae and Rimuru Tempest, the apt examples of “miss your waifus so much you turn into them”.
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