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Crepus used to say, of the falcon that answered only to Diluc, that it was a phoenix in disguise. Kaeya would find his place before the hearty fireplace, warm drink in hand, and settle in for his tales. Tell me about the phoenix, he would beg. The old man always humored him, even when his limbs grew out too long for it to be cute anymore.
As the story goes, there was once a bird.
Diluc stares at him with impossibly-round eyes, red irises framed by loose red hair. A monotone disaster, made iridescent by the sheer fact that it is him.
“What is this?”
Kaeya rolls his eyes. “It’s a turtle.”
“I know that!” When he sputters, his ears tint red as well. “Archons above, Kaeya, why is there a turtle in my room?”
“If you don’t like it, I’m sure Adelinde makes a great stew—”
“Stop!” Diluc knits his brows in a familiar expression, too delicate for a boy of his stature. He hesitantly pokes at the turtle, like its jaw might unhinge and swallow his hand whole. He peers at Kaeya through consternation-squinted eyelids. “You bring me a turtle and threaten to kill it?”
He smiles toothily. “Only the best for the great Master Diluc, right?”
Diluc is but another name for the sun, Kaeya thinks.
People do not quite agree on the same bird. Some say it is an eagle, some say it is a peacock—
The tavern is loud and boisterous, celebration permeating the air. It smells of apple cider and dandelion wine and a burning hearth. Home, if Kaeya could allow himself such a thing.
“My boy, captain!” Crepus all but bellows. It must be the tenth or eleventh time tonight, but happiness frees the repetition from any loss of meaning. “Knew he could do it…”
He looks ethereal in a makeshift seat of honor. Dim bar lighting sets his face aglow, washes out the eyebags that Kaeya knows are the price for such a title at such an age. Every bit the future heir to the winery in the nation where alcohol runs through its bloodstream. The youngest-ever captain in the Ordo Favonius in the nation which treasures freedom and liberty above all else. Pride-saturated words and stolen sips of wine paint Diluc into the very picture of greatness.
“Knew it from the start.”
—But the gist goes that it is very beautiful and very powerful.
“Captain, huh?”
The moonlight fades away the brightness of his flame-red hair. In the night, Kaeya can look at him without hurting himself.
"...Captain." Diluc mumbles it to himself, trying out the word that has been paraded around countless times today. His knees are drawn to his chest, boots scraping against the shingles of the rooftop. In the night, he looks very small and very young.
Kaeya paces the ridge of the roof. He can look. He can't touch. He paces and never wavers in his step, though the board spans no wider than the width of his boot. "So glum? There's not a soul in Mond that deserves it more than you."
"I suppose." Diluc might be smiling, something of fragile faith. Furrowed brows and tired eyebags. "Get down from there before you kill yourself, Kaeya."
Kaeya ignores him. "I have a cavalry captain to catch me," he laughs. "I can't die."
Conversation comes easier without eye contact, he finds. Like Diluc is talking to the moon and Kaeya is talking to the dirt beneath his soles.
It lived for a thousand years in Paradise, a perfect world beyond the sun…
Diluc bristles under his scrutiny. His face, always so unguarded, does its best to blush the vivid red of his hair.
"Seventeen, really?"
"Shut up," he says.
"Seventeen," Kaeya repeats, incredulous. "And not even a kiss."
He buries his flaming face in a gloved hand. "Just because you abandon all your responsibilities doesn't mean the rest of us—"
Kaeya takes an unreasonable delight in ruffling Diluc's neat ponytail. "Can't help it if I'm devilishly handsome. But Barbatos' beard, you really have no game."
And Diluc is staring at him with impossibly-round eyes. The epitome of greatness in Mondstadt, whose endless training and studying and diligence has left him with nothing to exert upon the topic of romance. And the young Master Diluc cannot accept mediocrity in any topic, now, can he?
He is so sincere and easy to nudge. It might be guilt-inducing, if Kaeya were the guilty type of person.
"Kaeya, I…"
Arranged marriages, contracts of diplomacy, of mutually beneficial relationships. The ribbon-haired girls and their merchant fathers, honed in on the future most eligible bachelor in Mondstadt. But of course. But of course.
Red sun eyes. Feathered lashes.
"Wouldn't want to disappoint a lovely lady somewhere down the line, huh?" Kaeya raises his brow, easy. Gracious. "Don't worry. I'll teach you my ways."
The future most eligible bachelor in Mondstadt crinkles into a relieved sort of happiness.
As with anything, he applies his all into the pursuit of excellence. Kaeya stares directly into the sun and is surprised when he emerges a changed man.
….Until its time grew short.
Kaeya has always been there for him. This is a constant so constant he is not aware of it until the absence of it stabs him through the chest. Kaeya has always been there, without fail, until tonight. He feels strangely disconnected, stepping from the Ordo’s pristine carriage onto a scene so dark and rain-soaked it feels like a long-dead cliché.
Diluc has red on his white gloves, his white face. The whites of his eyes, his pinpoint pupils, catch the light of the lantern like a wild animal. Vermillion gleaming from a blade. The man that took Kaeya in so many moons ago, reduced to a jumble of fabric and flesh in his only son’s arms.
When an animal is wounded, that is the easiest time to strike. Perhaps even the kindest.
Kaeya stares at his pale forehead when he talks. Something about eye contact, the naked red, would be too much. He can’t afford to lose his grip, not in this rainy stereotype of a tragedy. His walls return with a forceful apathy, like an old friend, a chain and shackle. Beautiful things are very easy to shatter. He doesn’t even remember what he says, but it’s enough to sweep up the remnants of a sun and crush it doubly into dust.
The hour of his ruin, Diluc is still beautiful. His eyes are twin suns burning with rage, fueled with fresh betrayal. He has never known loss, Kaeya realizes. Pain is something novel to the young heir. The untouchable man felled, the sun knocked out of orbit.
He’s never—
A wall of thick blue stops his flaming blade. Red eyes widen, sickly under frozen light.
He’s beautiful—
Kaeya is laughing.
But such a creature could never truly die.
Diluc leaves.
Grand Master Varka finds Kaeya in the morning like the world hasn’t been broken, like he should still be in this godless land at all, like he hasn’t been shunned by the sun itself. But the once-revered young master has nobody, does he? Nobody but a few maids and the poor kid his father took pity on. Varka hands Kaeya the glowing vision, a pointless reminder of what can never be unwound. He takes it. The red-orange glass is warm to the touch. The light exposes the translucent flesh between his fingers, an unyielding determination. Cutting through, deadly, to the truth.
Diluc is a lost star who has not yet learned that the truth is a terrible and messy thing.
Who is Kaeya, then, to cry over the ashes of a dead sun?
Instead, this is what it did to be reborn.
Diluc does not return.
Jean assumes the role of Acting Grandmaster, which everybody but her knows is because she’s running the country better than Varka could anyways. She surveys the Knights with a critical eye of a general whose resources are strained far too thin. Eroch and a number of men like him are purged from the Ordo’s ranks. More than Kaeya would like, certainly. But less than he expects. The turn of the hourglass hardens his heart, perhaps, for he finds Diluc a fool and a coward for leaving over so little. Corruption, such a detested thing. Possibly the most common thing on this planet. And so every foolish second of every foolish day, Kaeya steps closer to the conclusion that Diluc is buried in a loveless land, driven to his death by a reckless naivete and a world that was never as kind as he thought.
When Kaeya throws enough of his newfound captain’s salary into Death After Noon, he makes excuses. Of course Diluc would believe justice can be found. Of course he would bear his blade against everything that has ever wronged him. The sun has never seen the night. The sun only exists, as the rest of the world revolves around it.
When Kaeya drinks just enough to retain his captain's pride, teetering between charmingly buzzed and drunkard, he thinks about the vision. The urge to smash its delicate glass face whispering between his fingers. He hates it, its incessant glow burning into his memory. He locks it inside a drawer and buries the key under a meter of ice. He toes the line.
If Diluc is the one to leave everything, Kaeya is not a coward for wanting to forget. Right?
It flew into the mortal world. It built a nest and waited for the sunrise.
As one of ten cavalry captains, Kaeya really has no right to know of the higher international relations. As the friend and confidante of the Acting Grandmaster, however, it's something of his duty to listen to her burdens.
Snezhnaya and Monstadt have not been on the best of terms since… well, since Kaeya can remember. It started with the Tsaritsa's full endorsement of the Fatui, and considering how widespread the organization has grown to be now, the tendrils of unease have had a long time to creep in.
"There's an individual attacking the Fatui." Jean stares into her tea with clear-water eyes. Her brow knits and her lips thin. The Acting Grandmaster—so hardworking, so easy to read.
"They think it's Mond," Kaeya finishes.
She bites at her lip. Though shadows cling to the hollows of her face, her beauty shines nonetheless, indisputable. Beauty and strength and purity, something burning for justice—Kaeya feels momentarily ill.
"It's not."
"I know."
"I wouldn't—"
"I know."
Jean smiles at him, tired. "Not a thing you don't know, hm?"
Kaeya can pretend it's true. But his stomach turns with a half-buried thought, a connection too personal to be entirely plausible.
He suspects the vigilante sends the Fatui a message, somehow. They stop harassing Jean as the summer takes its last breath. It is a few months after Diluc's departure, and it is when Kaeya's suspicions crystallize. Hope, or the bitter mockery of hope, wells up in between his cracks.
It burst into glorious flames with the light of dawn.
The Fatui strongholds fall, dominoes in the path of a meteorite picking up speed. Every time, Kaeya learns, burned to the ground.
It is no longer confined to the private discussions in the Acting Grandmaster's office, this faceless arsonist. The captains are made well-aware, for the ire of the Fatui—even without targeting Mondstadt specifically—crosses into threatening territory. Even a well-informed civilian might know, at this point. The perpetrator acts with no tact, brutal in his destruction, and Kaeya cannot help but track his movement across the map. The Liyuean cliffside. The Fontaine marshlands. He creeps closer to Snezhnaya, the devastation increasing and the respite in-between decreasing.
If Kaeya knows this from second, third-hand accounts, he's certain the Fatui knows it. It does not fare well for their reputation, for a single lawless man to destroy their bases so simply.
The eleven must have taken notice.
September thirteenth. Diluc tears through a Ruin Guard research center near the shore. Morepesok, the town only a few meters north, reports two casualties.
The eleven must have—
September twenty-eighth. Diluc wrecks a well-armed training camp further inland.
They must have—
October. November.
Silence.
The coldest months greet Kaeya, echoing the dread in his stomach.
It drew its final breath, but this was not the end of the story. After three days, the Phoenix would rise from its ashes.
Kaeya thinks it's easier this way, for Diluc to die a fool discovering the consequences of his actions. An object of vitriol. This is what Kaeya chooses to believe, so that he may carry on with his life without breaking at the slightest touch.
Three years.
The Fatui, for all their prodding at ruin guards and incomprehensible technology, choose to send a pen-and-paper letter.
They have Lisa analyse the mail for residue energy, for ill-intent. They have Kaeya slit the envelope—still the newest captain, it is unsaid but he knows. Eternally the pale replacement, expendable. Once he proves to keep all his fingers, Jean takes the letter.
Three years.
Crystal eyes flicker. Her frown deepens.
"The… Twelfth Harbinger?"
Her Majesty the Tsaritsa would kindly request an audience before the Knights of Mondstadt, as represented by the Eleventh and Twelfth Harbingers.
Like the ticking of a clock, then, the Knights race to accommodate them. A cruel race orchestrated by the archon of time against that of love. Love, freedom, justice, war—Kaeya holds these arbitrary values under his silvertongue and tries not to go insane.
His instincts are very rarely wrong, but if they are… he would not need even the slightest touch.
Some stories say it decomposed for those three days, and that the new Phoenix emerged from the remains of the original.
Morbid, isn't it?
A perpetual motion machine in the shape of a man. That is what Kaeya is, as he claws the air back into his lungs with an endless line of lies. The truth stands, the truth stares, the truth watches impassive as he laughs himself to death.
His eyes are melting into their sockets.
The twelfth is a dead sun. The twelfth is the most horrifying thing he's ever laid eyes on. The twelfth is—
"Diluc—"
Not a name or a word but a strangled evocation.
His mane of hair gleams aflame with the sunlight, but his eyes are dead as the ashes. Kaeya thinks back to the last night he had seen those eyes. Goodbye, betrayed fury. Goodbye, sun.
The Twelfth Harbinger glances over him for a sliver of a second. Steps forward with Fatui heels clicking like Kaeya doesn't exist, like he doesn't even deserve a word.
So maybe he doesn't.
But still—despite knowing better, because of it—Kaeya calls out. Something self-righteous and spiteful burns.
"Luc—"
He does not turn. His red hair is a furious halo under cold light.
"It's Cietrulo."
He does not turn. The truth watches, impassive.
So maybe Kaeya doesn't deserve it.
But still.
Diluc is still beautiful.
That's the awful, impassive truth of it, the one that drives Kaeya to drink himself into a stupor later. He is still beautiful, burning, untouchable as ever. This is Diluc—not his Diluc, though Kaeya vaguely remembers shattering his Diluc years ago—after finding the terrible and messy truth. But Kaeya is fucking right; he is long dead and buried in a loveless land.
So this is it, then. The abyss of a man burned too bright, too soon. The searing afterimage, negative space in the absence of light, faith, honor. Not Diluc, but Cietrulo, a being of fresh blood spilled over snow.
What happens when a lost star turns on its course?
The new Phoenix burned just as beautifully as the last, if not more.
The Eleventh Harbinger finds Kaeya half-alive exiting the Knights' headquarters. He bares his teeth in a too-friendly sadist's smile.
"Sir Kaeya!"
The slightest touch, Kaeya thinks. Less than the slightest touch. Fingernails digging.
"Harbinger Tartaglia."
"Aw, when it's just us you don't have to worry about titles and formalities!" He's so young. His hair is uncombed and messy, his sleeves rolled up haphazardly to the elbows. "Childe is fine."
"Childe, then." Even to his liar's self, Kaeya knows his mask is tearing at the seams. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
The Harbinger—only a growth spurt and a few polished insignias beyond a teenager—beams. "One step closer to being friends! That makes it more appropriate for me to do this, right?"
Ocean eyes burn with rage. The shock takes Kaeya aback. Less than the slightest touch—
"As a friend, Kaeya, this is a heads-up. A warning, if you want."
No, Kaeya doesn't want. His skin prickles with cold sweat.
"Our dear friend has built quite a reputation for his bloodthirst. I've heard it even rivals mine." White teeth, sharp canines.
"But he has none of my mercy." Less than the slightest— "So perhaps the place he once called home should be prepared. You know, should anything happen. Should the winds of a godless land be inclined to carry a spark."
Kaeya's stomach turns. He feels rooted to the spot, grin frozen on his shattering face.
"Best to keep him happy, then. You could start by calling him his proper title," Childe says, open and living, "captain."
So this is who hates in place of Diluc. This is who carries his pain and his rage and his incessant-extinguished flame now. Like a caricature, life and death, the sun and the void.
Childe looks over Kaeya, like he has an infinity of other things to say. Childe quirks a brow and spins around instead of opening his mouth again, like he has better ways to spend his time.
Less than the slightest—
The Eleventh Harbinger's neck is marked. Red and bold. Reckless, awful, beautiful, terrible, red—
The slightest—
Once reborn, it returned to Paradise.
Cietrulo toys with the ends of his hair. Face void of expression.
"Should I trim it short?"
Childe runs his fingers through the silk of red. "Why? Looks good on you."
"Mm, gets in the way when I fight."
"Your last three victims might disagree," Childe smiles. "I'll braid it, if you want."
Cietrulo raises his brow a fraction of a degree. "You're more annoying than usual." He picks up his Fatui blade and starts polishing it with the rough of his coat, where any stain would be well-hidden between interwoven black threads. Once the weapon is deemed acceptable—though not satisfactory, never enough for his starving wildfire—he examines it with the same intensity he looks at everything. Vermillion embers, quiet and deadly.
Tsaritsa's tits, he's beautiful.
"I'm in a good mood," Childe tells him, combing through the strands. "Excited to see you in action."
One should not look directly into the sun, for mortal eyes cannot handle the sear of such brightness. But Childe has never cared for his mortal limits. If he should have to extinguish the sun to appease his selfish mortal desires, so be it. It might be guilt-inducing, if Childe were the guilty type of person.
And archons above, his sun looks good in action.
Call Childe tasteless, call him blind, but he thinks the whole world looks better in red. Monochromatic red and black like the edge of Cietrulo's blade. The edge of his tongue. The barest gleam of gold along his delicate wrists, the curve of his ear. Pragmatic as always, but still.
Childe's fingers creep over bare skin.
"Horny bastard," Cietrulo huffs. Nevertheless, he leans into the warmth of Childe's arms. They fit so nicely, Childe finds. The sunset and the waves.
"We'll destroy them," he promises earnestly.
Stupid motherfuckers, to cast their sun from its trajectory. He thinks the dark will serve them well. He thinks the catharsis will taste of red.
"We'll destroy them."
He thinks this is love.
What? You say it's a ridiculous story?
Myths don't need to have morals or make sense, Kaeya. Reality is difficult enough, so let's enjoy a happy ending here.