There was a reliable framework for reading Zhongli, and Venti, through long and educational personal experience, had developed it into something close to a science.
The short version: if he invited you to call him by his mortal name, the situation was navigable. If he asked you to call him by his Archon name…
The last time Venti had heard call me Barbatos directed at himself, he had spent the following thirty minutes encased in Geo formation while Zhongli discussed, with great thoroughness, the specific clause of their shared agreement that Venti had violated and the appropriate nature of the remedy. He still maintained that the contract had been worded ambiguously. He maintained this privately, to himself, and did not raise the point with Zhongli.
Aether had not had many direct dealings with Zhongli. But he had enough experience with people who operated through stated principle and concealed intent to read the room without needing the full background.
The room was saying: you are about to receive the contractual remedy for a violation you committed in full knowledge that it was a violation, and the form the remedy takes will be determined entirely by the administrator of the remedy, who is the person you violated the contract with.
This was not a comfortable place to be.
Aether sat.
Zhongli sat. He produced tea with the unhurried sequence of someone who had a great deal of practice at receiving guests and had decided to take the long form of the process today.
He also produced the remote control, looked at the air conditioning unit mounted on the wall above Aether's seat, and adjusted the temperature to eighteen degrees with the specific decisiveness of someone who has considered multiple options and selected the one that communicated their feelings most precisely without technically doing anything that could be called hostile.
The vent was aimed directly at Aether's chair. This was not a coincidence.
Aether felt the first breath of cold air hit the back of his neck.
He did not move.
Then Zhongli went to the refrigerator, a device that Aether had by now added to his ongoing mental inventory of the MC World's products appearing in Teyvat, and produced a drink. Not a warm drink. The drink had been stored at temperatures that had taken it beyond cold into the category of solid, and the sound it made when Zhongli set it in front of Aether had the specific quality of ice being placed on a table.
He also, from the stove, produced a pot of hot tea. This he poured into a cup for himself.
He sat back down and turned on the television.
The programme was a recording of Yun Jin's most recent performance at the Heyu Tea House, which Zhongli had apparently thought to preserve. He watched it with the expression of a man entirely at peace with how he was spending his afternoon.
Aether looked at the frozen drink in front of him.
He looked at the air conditioning vent overhead.
He looked at the hard wooden stool he was sitting on, which was the only seat available to him because Zhongli was occupying the cushioned sofa.
He thought several things about Zhongli that were not complimentary.
Then he extended a careful thread of his remaining elemental energy, not enough to be alarming, just enough to be useful, and melted the frozen drink into something he could actually consume. He set it aside on the table without drinking it, because accepting items offered in the context of a passive-aggressive contractual reckoning was a signal he was not going to send.
He adjusted his posture on the stool and elected not to say anything yet.
Zhongli watched opera.
The silence accumulated in the way that silences do when both parties are aware of what is in it and neither has decided to be the one to acknowledge it first.
A recording of Yun Jin completed a particularly complex section of the Farewell to the Mortal World, and Zhongli's expression moved approximately one degree in the direction of appreciation.
Aether shifted on the stool.
Not because the cold was bothering him, it was not, and not because the stool was uncomfortable to the point of actual distress, though it was deliberately uncomfortable. He shifted because sitting in silence across from the former God of Contracts while deliberately being given the hard seat and the frozen drink and the direct air conditioning had a specific psychological weight to it that was difficult to simply ignore, even for someone with five hundred years of patience.
He cleared his throat.
"Morax. If there is something you want to say, say it. I am not going to pretend I don't know why I am here."
Zhongli did not look away from the screen immediately. He finished watching the passage he was watching, then set down his tea with the deliberateness of a man marking a transition.
"You are correct," he said. "You violated a contract. You knew when you did so that it was a violation."
"I know."
"The terms of that contract were explicit."
"They were."
"And yet."
"And yet," Aether agreed, because there was genuinely nothing else to say. He had come here knowing the Geo Punishment was part of the price of entry, and he had come anyway, which meant he had determined the price was worth it. The only reasonable posture was to accept the accounting.
Zhongli looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone taking a final measurement before pronouncing a conclusion.
Then, with the air of someone operating at the precise intersection of principle and mild personal satisfaction:
He pressed his palm gently downward.
The weight of Geo settled across Aether's shoulders with the specific quality of a phenomenon that was simultaneously natural law and personal opinion. Not crushing. Not painful. Simply present, in the way that the judgment of a ten-thousand-year-old God of Contracts tends to be present: completely, and without the option to argue.
Aether sat under it without speaking.
It lasted approximately thirty seconds.
Then it lifted, as precisely as it had arrived.
Zhongli straightened, picked up his tea, and returned his attention to the screen.
"Contractual matter addressed," he said, in the tone of someone filing a document.
"...Yes," Aether said, after a moment.
"You wished to speak about a number of things."
"I did."
"Then speak." He did not move to turn off the air conditioning. "I am listening."
Aether had been organising his questions for several days, and he began.
He asked about the Alliance's structure, how it operated, what it required of member nations, what it expected of entities that were not nations but wanted access to what it offered. He asked about the alchemical elixirs and the milk, specifically, what the process was for obtaining quantities sufficient to restore the humanity of a large number of people over time. He asked about the MC World's entry protocols and whether there was any formal arrangement for external parties.
Zhongli answered all of these, with the particular precision of someone who had been the primary architect of several of the frameworks being asked about, and who considered accurate information one of the things the world was owed. He was not warm about it. He was not cold about it. He simply answered what was asked, in the detail the question required, and nothing beyond that.
The cold air continued to blow.
At some point, someone in the exterior hallway had apparently arrived, because the muffled sound of conversation reached them through the door, and then the door opened.
Hu Tao and Lumine came in together with the ease of two people who had been walking and talking for long enough that the transition from outside to inside was just a change of backdrop rather than an interruption. Both of them were carrying shopping bags. Several shopping bags. Paimon was also present, above and slightly behind them, managing what appeared to be an entire bag dedicated to food that was collectively larger than she was. She was managing it with the specific determination of someone for whom proximity to food produces reserves of strength not available in other circumstances.
The two of them looked at the room. Their gaze found Aether.
Lumine's expression moved through several configurations in approximately half a second.
Aether's expression did the same.
The first thing Lumine said was not a greeting.
"Oh, you actually came. And, are you sitting like that on purpose? Do you have a problem with your back?"
The callback was immediate and she knew exactly what she was doing, because he had said the same thing to her in an identical tone at least twice in their shared history of travel when she had sprawled across available furniture after long walks.
"Lumine."
"What?" She set down a bag with the innocence of a person who has done nothing.
"The portrait," Aether said.
A pause.
"The Millelith had it posted at the gate," he continued, with the specific quality of someone delivering a verdict rather than an observation. "The one where you apparently described my appearance as, "
"I described your appearance accurately."
"One of the guards used the word abstract."
"That is a valid artistic term."
"For my face."
"Faces can be abstract." She looked at him with complete composure. "Art is subjective."
"Lumine, "
"How was I supposed to remember every feature exactly? You were not standing in front of me when I drew it."
"You drew it from four thousand years of memory."
"Memory fades."
"Selectively, apparently."
"Selectively," she agreed, cheerfully.
He stared at her. She returned the stare. There was a history between these two expressions that stretched back further than most civilisations.
Then Hu Tao, who had been watching this with the delighted expression of a person who has just discovered an unexpected form of entertainment in her own living room, said:
"Oh! Is this your brother, Lumine? You two do look alike!"
Lumine turned to Hu Tao. Something in her expression rearranged itself.
"Alike?" She pulled her chin back with the wounded dignity of someone who has been compared to something that offends them. "I am a timeless and radiant beauty. This individual, " she gestured at Aether ", is actively trying to maintain a youthful appearance well past the point at which it is appropriate."
"You are several thousand years old," Aether said. "If I am maintaining a youthful appearance past the appropriate point, so are you."
"We are twins. The mathematics are the same."
"Which means your comment about me also applies to you."
"It does not."
"Why not?"
"Because I am a timeless and radiant beauty."
"That is not a counter-argument."
"It is a statement of fact."
The shopping bag hit him before he had finished the sentence. It was not a small bag.
He grabbed the nearest available object, a throw pillow from the arm of the sofa, and returned fire.
What followed was, by any objective assessment, not dignified.
It was, however, extremely characteristic.
Every available surface became contested territory. The shopping bags were weapons. The throw pillows were weapons. At one point Paimon was appealed to directly by Lumine as an ally, and Paimon, who had been watching events with the expression of a spectator at a performance they had paid for, produced a small bag of snacks from somewhere on her person, which she threw at Aether with genuine enthusiasm.
The charges levelled were extensive and personal.
Aether's crimes, as listed by Lumine: condescension, unnecessary seniority assertions, abandoning her to go live in an underground cult, allowing her to look for him for years while he "sat in the Abyss in comfort," and general overbearingness regarding a three-minute age gap that he had parlayed into decades of behavioural authority.
Lumine's crimes, as listed by Aether: the portrait, subsequent failure to issue any correction to said portrait, being the reason the Millelith now had a poster describing his face as abstract, informing the city guard that he was "short," operating the phrase "big brother" as a weapon of condescension rather than affection, and four thousand years of accumulated instances of behaviour that he was not going to enumerate in full because the list would take longer than the argument.
Zhongli, still on the sofa, had not moved. His tea was still warm. He watched the exchange with the expression of a man observing a natural phenomenon that he had been told to expect but had not quite anticipated the scale of.
Hu Tao made two attempts to intervene. The first was overridden by the momentum of the argument. The second was more direct.
"Enough!" She inserted herself between them with the authority of someone who has been running a funeral establishment since thirteen and is therefore unfrightened by human conflict at any volume. "I will not have my parlour turned into a disaster zone. Both of you, separate. Now."
She pointed at Lumine, who was redirected firmly toward the interior of the building with the additional note that if she wanted the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor to bill a coffin of the lowest grade to Ningguang's account, she could say so like an adult.
She pointed at Aether, who remained in the wreckage of the living room with the expression of someone who had, under controlled circumstances, just experienced something they had needed for quite a long time without fully knowing it.
The door closed.
Silence returned.
Aether smoothed his coat lapels. Straightened his braid. Looked at the scattered shopping bags and throw pillows around him.
Then, quietly, to himself:
"Four thousand years and she still does exactly that."
From somewhere beyond the closed door, muffled: "I heard that!"
He had not kept his voice down on purpose.
Beside him, Endis had remained completely still for the entire duration, in the specific way of someone who has decided that the correct strategy is to achieve invisibility through stillness and is fully committed to the approach. She was looking at approximately nothing. Her expression was the expression of a person having no thoughts.
Aether looked at her.
She continued to have no thoughts.
He sighed.
He turned to Zhongli, who had watched all of this from his sofa with the serenity of a man who had nothing to apologise for and was comfortable with that.
"We were discussing the Alliance's entry protocols," Aether said, as though nothing had occurred.
Zhongli picked up his tea.
"Indeed." He glanced at the floor, then at Aether, with no change in expression.
"Clean this up first."