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If all goes according to plan, Kaeya should arrive…
Right… about… now.
Diluc looks up from his pocket watch, frowning as the Cavalry Captain fails to appear despite all alleys scouted, the underground tunnels already accounted for. His agents have never been off before. So, how—?
“The rooftops,” Kaeya sighs, leaping off of a nearby balcony. “Getting senile in your old age?”
“I’m younger than you,” Diluc retorts, crossing his arms. “Forgive me for assuming you wouldn’t resort to climbing rooftops in broad daylight.”
Technically, the sun hasn’t fully risen yet, but still—something doesn’t add up. Even with the rooftops, the captain should not have been able to climb onto the building without someone taking notice, including his agents.
Of course, that’s hardly the point.
The Cryo wielder leans casually against the alley wall, absentmindedly playing with his blade. “Here to warn me away from Jean? There’s really no need. I was never interested in her like that anyway. Or… perhaps you’re here to finish the job from all those years ago?” he drawls, smile sharp. “A little sloppy, don’t you think, acting in broad daylight?”
“Hardly,” Diluc scoffs. “If I wanted you dead, you certainly would be.”
“Oh, really ? How little you think of my abilities,” Kaeya says mournfully. A strange glimmer emerges in his eye. “Care to test it?”
“Kaeya.”
“Hmm?” The man lazily flips a coin.
Diluc sighs, a grimace briefly flickering across his stoic face. The speech he’d prepared suddenly feels inadequate in the face of it all, four years of solitude and… questions. Remonstrations, anger, excuses.
But, as Jean had very easily shown, Diluc is hardly the only one to have suffered through all of it.
He used to be so good at this kind of thing.
(He used to be a lot of things.)
“I wanted to… talk.” Diluc clears his throat. “About everything.”
Kaeya nearly misses the next catch, coin nearly slipping from his grasp. “Oh?” And then, perhaps out of kindness, or simply to regain his own composure, the captain shakes his head. “Wanting to talk in the back of an alley, after having spies track me down. Really, brother dearest, one wonders what kind of friends you’ve been keeping lately…”
The winemaster sighs, offering an olive branch. “In my defense, I wasn’t sure you’d come otherwise. I can have tea set up at the townhouse.”
Carefully nonchalant, “Hmm, maybe. What kind?”
“Your pick.” Kaeya never turns down a chance to snoop, and Diluc isn’t above taking advantage of it.
When the captain acquiesces, Diluc feels his shoulders relax.
---
As expected, Kaeya shamelessly scours the premises, though Diluc isn’t quite sure what it is he’s looking for. Stray intelligence, perhaps? He ought to know better. Nothing like that would ever be left lying around unguarded.
He gets his answer when he notices the captain glancing curiously at his neck.
“So,” says the Cryo wielder.
“No.”
He resists the urge to fidget with his collar.
“I’m just saying—”
“Absolutely not.”
Kaeya smirks. “After all the stress of nearly dying, you’re saying you really didn’t have thank-archons-she-survived sex? Not even make-up sex?”
The wine tycoon buries his face in his hands with a groan, face flaming. Kaeya was always like this: flippant, generally irreverent, often—
Deflective, Diluc realizes. He probably judged at a glance that nothing of the sort had occurred.
He raises his head, eyes wandering surreptitiously.
Ah. As expected, one of Kaeya’s subtle tells—feet pointing to the exit despite all other signs of lazy relaxation, unruffled demeanor carefully staged. Certainly an excellent spy, even from a young age.
But Kaeya is not the one who severely burned his brother.
(“What does it matter that we’re not ‘related by blood?’” Diluc huffs. “Doesn’t mean you deserve the Ragnvindr name any less.”
Kaeya simply shrugs. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Still, Pallad had no right to say it.” The young Ragnvindr heir scowls, eyebrows furrowing as he thinks for a moment before grabbing his pocket knife and making a small cut on his thumb.
“What are you doing?”
Diluc hands the knife to his brother. “Making a blood oath. You know, like in the stories? Then we’ll be blood brothers, sworn to fight side by side forever.”
Kaeya stares at the knife for a moment, something unreadable passing through his eyes.
After a beat, he takes it.)
“That’s not what we’re here to discuss,” Diluc says at last. “Kaeya, I—”
He sighs gustily, briefly clenching his eyes shut. “I don’t know how to start this. I can’t—” Diluc makes a vague gesture with his hand, myriad words flitting through his mind like sand sifting through a sieve. All of them, lacking.
“I’m sorry. For everything.”
Something flickers in Kaeya’s eye, but for the first time Diluc realizes that he can no longer read it; that what he can see, too, are only echoes that remain, like the shadows he sees of Jean—lingering habits and gestures, a portrait frozen in time. Recognizable, but still fundamentally different from its older self.
And he would never truly know how the former became the latter. The in-between would forever be lost to him; memories he does not notice at Jean’s house, missing fragments in the timeline.
“Did you really intend to—”
Diluc shakes his head, swallowing heavily. “I don’t know. Maybe. I thought so, but... I don’t know that I could have gone through with it.”
Kaeya’s face is calm, but his hands tremble almost imperceptibly.
“I don’t blame you.”
Diluc grits his teeth, crimson eyes flashing. “You should. I can’t believe I—that I even considered—!” He clenches his fist. “I swore an oath.”
“To be fair,” the captain replies, trying to recapture his earlier nonchalance, “we were children at the time.”
“I meant it,” Diluc retorts fiercely. “I meant every word.”
“...I know.”
“I know it’ll take time. I know… this doesn’t make up for the past years, or for barring you from the funeral, or—” his voice fades into a whisper. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness. I don’t deserve it, I know. Believe me, I know.”
Diluc laughs humorlessly. “Jean’s recounts alone have shown me just how much I’ve messed things up. I never even spared a thought for it all—”
“Alright,” Kaeya drawls, somewhat wobbly, having stood up and drawn closer in Diluc’s distraction. “Enough of that.”
He takes out a handkerchief, casually wiping the tears from the redhead’s cheeks—as though this is completely normal, a day-to-day interaction. “It’s all in the past. I knew what might happen when I opened that door anyhow,” he shrugs, pulling the cloth back.
Diluc catches his wrist, keeping him in place. Kaeya falls silent.
“You hoped otherwise.”
Kaeya sighs.
“Yes.”
Diluc pulls, and his brother lets him.
“I’m sorry,” Diluc repeats, over and over, gloved hands gripping tightly to the back of Kaeya’s jacket.
“I know,” the captain replies lightly, holding even tighter.