Chapter Text
A crimson finch awakens, stretches its fragile wings in the midday sun. Air passes. Naked birch trees shiver in the angular breeze and release powdery snow onto Diluc’s shadow.
He takes a curl of bone-white bark and peels it from the narrow trunk. The dormant body beneath is red and sticky with sap, and shards of it - crystallized by the cold, Diluc surmises - are wedged in the seams of the wood. He runs his finger along a golden droplet preserved in descent and it yields. Tacky, softened by the heat of his skin. Diluc presses into it and the shape sinks; the sap returns to the wood grain. There is honeyed lifeblood oozing from the carmine wounds in the wood. In the spring, insects will drown in the birches’ sweet efflux.
The piece of birch bark finds residence in his pocket, and Diluc continues on through the trees, back toward the estate. He observes the shifting scenery, eyes moving between soil and sky.
The season’s last snowfall in Mondstadt is bare and light. Ornate flakes - large enough that Diluc can map out their anatomy - accumulate in white mounds along the winery’s paths, and Diluc cares little to push them aside. It all collects curvilinear on the jutting rocks. When the sun presses its warming, yellow body, the snow gives out - sinks into the dark dirt and topples into the steady path of the river.
Kazuha’s question often comes to him as he walks along those dirt paths, between birch and cedar and humble stone.
“How long does ice have to be melted before it’s allowed to be called water?”
There are minuscule leaf buds on the wet, black boughs. Shyly curled up, but still the bright green that only young plants can be. The color of nervous anticipation. There are the pointed hats of bamboo shoots too – poking up from underneath their white sheets. Diluc catalogues each leaf, each sprout. He senses the world spinning, time progressing, and wonders how he, too, will come to change.
-
“Charles said I should stop by.”
Kaeya stands stalagmite stiff at the edge of the property, the end of his hair spooled around a single, long finger. Diluc watches the coiling with caution. He had forgotten; Charles had mentioned his impending visit in passing words while Diluc was buried in a ledger, decoding illegible clusters of inked figures. The words had glanced off of him - useless against the impenetrable shield of thought. And now Kaeya had arrived neat as an arrow and taken Diluc by surprise.
And so the brothers stand, and neither dares to lean in one of the nearby chairs. It would mean relinquishing posture.
“It’s about the new batch,” Diluc says.
Kaeya just nods, and when his head dips, the navy length of his hair slackens and bows in its middle. But then his head is upright again and it’s taut, taut - returning his form to a series of unyielding, straight lines.
Part of Diluc wonders if he should try apologizing once more. A quick, mumbled “sorry” might be taken better than his previous attempts.
Instead he takes Kaeya to the stacked cases at the back of the winery’s building. They strange frost that swept over Liyue and Mondstadt - and sent Diluc riding to Kazuha - bode poorly for next year’s crop, but the several dozen bottles that Elzer had just approved for sale are tokens of last season's success.
“You don’t usually purchase full bottles,” Diluc says when Kaeya begins sifting through the cases.
“Oh?” Kaeya says, voice already raspy with discontent. “You seem interested in me little beyond my drinking habits.”
Kaeya is trying to bait Diluc into chastising him. They both know this; it’s evident in the way Kaeya’s lips twitch up into a mocking smirk. He lifts a bottle into the afternoon light and examines the sediment at its bottom.
Diluc feels himself frown and he turns away from Kaeya, from the obvious trap.
“What’s the occasion?” He asks.
Kaeya’s response is clipped. “Favonius business. I doubt you’re interested."
An inhale docks high in Diluc’s chest, residing there for a few white-hot moments before he finishes his breath.
“This week?”
“In a few hours.” Kaeya doesn’t look away from the bottle. He gives it an abrupt shake and the sediment swirls, sinks, settles. Diluc recognizes the particles. No dandelion dust.
“That’s the apple cider vinegar,” Diluc says, arms crossed. When he shakes his head in disapproval, a stray piece of hair falls into his vision, and he puffs upward - sending it off the ridge of his nose. “It should be chilled before you add any simple syrup."
Kaeya brings his free hand to the bottle’s neck and makes a sort of wry, unimpressed sound.
“I know,” he says, sharp and cold.
First there’s a shock of white encircling the edges of Kaeya’s fingertips, then a radiating, geometric snow across mossy green glass. It starts slow, but erupts in asemic white as the pattern of ice rapidly envelops the entire bottle. Once the final snowflake covers the last sliver of glass, Kaeya spins the wine in place to evaluate his work, and its crystalline case sends the sun off in shapes unknown to Diluc.
Ice is cold and organized. It waits, moves in predictable, mathematic forms. But fire leaps across blackened soil and bites ceaselessly at the sky. It dares to consume despite the laws of the earth, and even the faintest orange flicker has in it the desire for destruction. Their interaction is proof of it, Diluc thinks - of their fundamental differences.
Kaeya shakes his hand off close to his hip, and shards of translucent ice spray onto the paved stone. Beads of perspiration form instantaneously on the pieces that fall near Diluc’s form. Shimmering wet at even the suggestion of spring, of heat.
In the pile of entropic ice, Diluc sees one hundred tiny reflections of himself, moving back and forth in perfect mirrored time as he shifts his weight from foot to foot. In increasing measurements of smallness, his other selves disappear, and then there is nothing but the brassy sun as it swallows everything up.
-
Madame Ping’s gift of puer and porcelain sits in the guest room on the bookshelf beside the window nook. Dust gathers there, as it is wont to do in an old house, and Diluc takes great care to frequently wipe it away with a damp cloth. He does not wish for the set to fall into disuse, but after he’d seen that lifelike Kazuha in that surreal dream, the tea had come to represent far more than a simple meditative ritual.
Diluc is scared of dreams - perhaps more than nightmares. They show him everything he wants, and satisfaction seems to him more precarious than misfortune. It is, perhaps, that Diluc worries he will always have good things stolen from him by fate.
-
I am scared of love, old friend. I am scared not of its ephemerality, but its inevitability. The passing of water, the falling of cherry blossoms, even the maple leaves of my home town – these are symptoms of time’s comforting progression. I anticipate these phenomena with great pleasure, so why is it that my body seizes up at the slightest presence of love inside of it?
I am scared, maybe, of how this feeling could supplant my fondness for you, though I know it will not.
But perhaps it is not fear that I feel. It might be the case this feeling has no word. All I know is that it has possessed me, and it makes me helpless to my own desires in his company. I am nothing but red cheeks and shoulders before him.
I do not know much about his history, apart from rumors and secondhand information, but I see it in his face. Particularly at night, when he cannot control his expression.
Wherever he goes in dreams, it is a dark place. It is not often that I wake before Diluc, and the times I do, it is frightening. The nightmares take all color from him. He says things I do not understand: non-words, moans of pain.
I would like to go to that place in his sleep and paint over it all. If the past cannot be revoked, then the heart can be renovated.
That I gaze out so
—my thoughts overflowing with love—
he of course can’t know.
I am the one who has dyed
Those clouds in the evening sky.
Old friend, what would you do? How might I love an immolated man?
After Diluc finishes reading the journal entry, he sits for a long while with the book spread open, face down on the crest of his thigh. His heart presses against his chest, toward the vista framed by the guest room window – seeking Kazuha.
There are things, people Kazuha has lost, and Diluc knows only parts of it. He has questions.
Diluc closes the journal and places it on the shelf beside the tea set.
-
Diluc hands fit strangely around the gaiwan; he has not optimized his pouring. There are parts of the tea-making he is good at. Wedging air and metal between the layers of caked leaf. Boiling water. But these are the steps that lead up to the pour, and what should be easy – gravity’s work, liquid falling – he instead finds difficult.
Hazel slips out from the gap in the porcelain and overfills a single cup. The color protrudes with surface tension like an amulet. He is grateful for the bamboo tea tray beneath the cups. Spilling is a necessary part of the process, he thinks, though perhaps not this much.
He meditates on seven steeps, each brewing a few seconds longer than the last to draw out permutated flavor.
Sleep comes not long after.
The bamboo of Diluc’s dream is different than what grows at the periphery of the winery. The ends of it are lost in an unnatural – or simply unfamiliar – mist far above his head. He looks up through the canopy of clouds and sees other islands and the strips of pulsating amber that connect them. The sky, too, is that same creamy gold. Somewhere there is a sun, and it burns hot with the power of his subconscious.
The movement and space are just as odd as before, and when Diluc traverses the stone and grass and dirt, his entire person shivers with the knowledge that this place does not exist in the waking world. He gets the sense that all he can see is all he can go to here. There is nothing else beyond the expanse.
Diluc does not find Kazuha this time, and so he wanders among the shadows of great, languid clouds until the dream world slips out from under him.
-
Diluc finds little joy in the vaulted ceilings of the Favonius headquarters. His footsteps ring out in such a way that pins all attention to his person. Targeted. The junior knights jut out from vestibules, clumsy and curious. Many of them have never seen him here in these marbled hallways. They have only heard of his time here. Like a myth, he thinks sourly.
He escapes the ceaseless watching in the labyrinthine library. The bookshelves are as tall as he remembers. The wooden ceiling tiles cast the room in a comforting shadow – one that is challenged only by the sparse oil lamps scattered across the room.
Lisa is not there. Not at her desk to tally late books, nor in the stacks in pursuit of misplaced volumes. The library is empty, quiet – and though it’s refreshing to have some solitude, it also means he’s left alone with a strange, barbed sensation in his chest.
As a child, he spent many a day in this very room, poring over the winners’ histories and taking notes on elemental reactions. Now these chairs are pushed in close to the tables, upright and proper. No stray books. No young knights chasing each other amongst shelves. As a child, he enjoyed learning. Wrongness was foreign; failure had yet to spell death for him.
The thought is so distant it nearly fails to register as his own.
He goes to the Grandmaster’s office, and though it is the last place he wishes to visit, he knows it is where he will find Lisa.
When he knocks, Jean answers as if she knows it is him simply by the sound of his knuckles on wood. Upon his entry, neither she nor Lisa project surprise.
“Pardon my intrusion,” Diluc says, stepping in only a few paces until he’s square in the middle of the room’s rug.
Jean and Lisa are at the desk, a squat stack of leather-bound books before them. Diluc recognizes them from his time as cavalry captain – accounts of supplies, ledgers of inconsequential data. The higher up one is in the order of Favonius, the more mind-numbing clerical work with which they are saddled.
“Diluc,” Jean greets him with a gentle tilt of her head, and when her head dips down, the muscles connecting her neck to her shoulders flex. “What brings you here?”
“I would like to speak with Lisa – if the two of you can spare a moment.”
Lisa lifts the brim of her hat out of her vision and pinches it there – in an upward fold – for a moment. It resists and flops back downward, obscuring her face.
“How fortuitous,” she sings. “Is this about that last book I sent you? I hope you liked it.”
“You are thoughtful. Thank you for the gift.” Diluc means it. Only fools typecast Lisa by her flirtatiousness; her laidback attitude is a portico for her keen observational skills. It’s a pity that she’s fallen into disuse in the Favonius library, he thinks. “I have come for another reason.”
“Certainly,” Lisa says. “The matter must be urgent for you to step foot here.”
Diluc and Jean share the intimate knowledge of his last time in this office. He files it away – snuffs out the ember of it with a deep inhale. He has practice tending to this particular flame.
Diluc gives her a measured nod. “I have a few objects I’d like you to examine if you have the time.”
He produces the gaiwan set and cake of puer from the leather pouch he’d been carrying. The porcelain parts are folded up in linen cloth, and when he unwraps it, he takes care to set the cup and gaiwan lightly on the desk.
“A tea set from Liyue. How delightful,” Lisa says, turning the white dishes around in her elegant hands. The brocade curtains are drawn, and only the diffused glow of lamplight reflects off the ivory contours. She sets them down in their proper places onto the tea tray once she’s thoroughly looked over each piece.
“There is a marking on the bottom of the cup. I do not read Liyue script, and so I assumed it was the signature of its artist,” Diluc motions vaguely, palm up.
Lisa flips the cup upside down, holds it up to her discerning eye for a few seconds, and sets it back on the bamboo. Jean watches with her fingers interlocked at the small of her waist.
“It is a seal of sorts. I don’t believe it is actually Liyue writing. Looks to be something older,” she says, the music in her voice replaced with a contemplative hum.
Before Diluc can compose a follow-up question, Lisa’s hand goes to the puer. She takes it from the transparent paper in which it had been stored and holds the disc of foliage up to the overhead glow to pick at its errant dried leaves.
“There’s one on the paper of this tea cake as well. See – here.” She offers the cake to Diluc and he spots it – a square of white paper lodged in the dark leaf.
“What do they mean?” He asks after he’s inspected the strokes of black ink.
“I know little of this language, but this looks to be the character for light of dawn,” Lisa says. “It’s a finicky word. Specific, but elusive. I’ve really only encountered it in adeptal poetry.”
Diluc sets the puer back onto the desk and Jean looks at it from where she stands without moving. A third-party observer.
“What of the bottom of the cup?” Diluc asks.
Lisa tilts her head as she reads the character. Its ink has a similar depth – pitch, void – but the glaze lends it some shine.
“Forgive me - my translation is rusty. It looks like the character for flight or voyage.”
Diluc makes a sound of approval – not at the meaning, for it is still enigmatic to him, but at her cleverness. Jean, too, seems to bask in the success of her colleague, for she’s helpless to the smile that catches at the corners of her rosy mouth.
“Does the combination of the two yield any additional meaning?” Diluc brings the cup and the cake beside each other as if further proximity might yield better answers.
“A reasonable conclusion,” Lisa says, eyes passing over leaf and ceramic. “But that I do not know.”
“There is magic, though,” Diluc says. There’s something in her body language that tells him this – words unsaid at the base of her throat, stalling breath. “You sense something.”
Lisa exhales, and it is not leaden or relieved. Simply air.
“It is not mortal magic." The words come out of her bare and quiet. The thought is frightening to speak aloud.
Jean asks the question before Diluc can – as if the mystery of it all has enraptured her.
“Could it be the work of an archon?”
“No,” Lisa starts, gaze briefly breaking from the tea set to pass over Jean’s curious expression. “It doesn’t bear such a powerful imprint, but it could perhaps be a lesser power?” A pause. She looks to Diluc in an upward motion, starting first with the Pyro vision at his hipbone and ending with the crown of his head. “Who gave this to you?”
“A woman by the name of Madame Ping in Liyue.”
Neither Diluc nor Lisa misses the way Jean’s eyes open wide at the name.
“You know her,” he says.
“Ningguang has spoke of her in our correspondence,” is Jean’s explanation. “She is the one who keeps watch over Yujing Terrace.”
“That’s where I met her.”
Lisa coos. That amused lilt is back in her voice. The jade glint in her eye. She tips her head downward to survey the tea set again, and the elongated brim of her hat obscures part of her face once more.
“She is likely an adeptus,” Lisa says, the point of her chin cupped in her long hand. “Or she had one inscribe these marks.”
“You should send her a letter,” Jean says.
Letters. Jean is partial to text, Diluc thinks. Things that cannot be refuted. If only the world was in line with her ideals - things would be far simpler.
“I will, but I doubt she will explain it to me,” he says, trying to not sound too dismissive of the idea. “If she had wanted me to know the details of the spell, she would have told me in the first place, I believe.”
“Or perhaps she wanted to wait until you understood the gift’s purpose,” is Jean’s rebuttal.
Diluc shifts his weight to his other foot and crosses his arms. The lamps do not flicker; the dyed pennants hung high on the the walls remain limp. There is no breeze here – only the rhythmic breathing of people.
His mind goes to the strange, still air of the golden dream. Its pulsating sun.
“I have experienced its magic, but I would not say its purpose yet.”
“What does it do?” Lisa asks.
“If I prepare the tea properly, I am taken somewhere in dreams.” It is the simplest way Diluc can think to explain it. “It seems that the more steeps I drink, the longer my stay is.”
“Is it always the same place?”
He makes a truncated, embarrassed sound into the back of his hand. It feels childlike to describe dreams. But Diluc illustrates the otherness of the world with carefully chosen details. The towering bamboo culms, the floating promontories over seas of thick cloud, the trees petrified in amber and sap. Lisa asks more about the sky and he tries to explain how the firmament is suspended in eternal sunset. He manages. She hums low.
He does not care to explain the surreal sensation of simply existing there; he does not think he could do it justice.
“You are alone when you go here?” Lisa asks.
“Not every time. I have seen Kazuha there once.” Just saying his name stirs up pink longing in his chest. Diluc places a hand at his collarbone to steady himself.
“But he was a figment,” she says.
“I’m not sure of this yet,” Diluc says. “But given that he also has in his possession a god-touched cup…”
The implication hangs opaque in the air for only a moment before Jean converts it into words. She likes things to be explicit, to be clear.
“You believe he is being transported there too,” she says, blonde lashes fluttering closed as she sinks into some far off thought.
“Yes,” is all Diluc can think to say.
“I can see why you are confused,” starts Lisa. “Whatever it is that the gods and adepti have intended to happen in that realm – it is unclear. But this power is something fierce, and you’d do best to not take it for granted.”
It is rare for her to speak so seriously, and Diluc does not shrug the weight of it off his shoulders.
“I will send a letter to Madame Ping, then,” he says. “If only for the sake of trying.”
Jean’s eyes open slowly, surely.
“There is another option,” she says. “Another adeptus I know of in Liyue – at Yuehai Pavilion. The secretary of the Qixing.”
Glaze lilies color Diluc’s thoughts. He had not considered her.
“The horned woman.”
Jean nods, and her head lolls limp a bit. Heavy with consideration - and fatigue.
“Yes, perhaps you should send also send a letter to the Tianquan. Ganyu – I believe is her name – is often quite busy with the affairs of the Qixing and may be slow in responding.”
Diluc sort of plays with the end of his shirt. It seems strange to feel embarrassed now - after they've already had their discussion. And yet - the feeling rises up, humid and bloated in his chest, anyway.
“I am grateful to have received advice from both of you," he says.
“Yes, I am sorry that you had to come here of all places to meet us.” Jean performs a smile. Perhaps in the morning she'd had more energy for pleasantries.
“It is a minor detail,” Diluc says, offering his palms up in a sort of white-flagged gesture. Something that is meant to say he has no intent on discussing the matter any further. “Well worth what I have learned.”
“Diluc,” Lisa says after a second. “You are an intelligent fellow. What do you think is the purpose of all this? Gods do not give mortals magicked cups for paltry reasons.”
It takes several more moments of silence before Diluc is able to conjure a response.
“I believe there are things Kazuha and I must learn from each other.”
Lisa makes a keening whine like she’s dissatisfied with the answer. She absent-mindedly flips a corner of the linen cloth over the gaiwan and cup.
“Whatever knowledge divinity wishes to bestow upon you – I hope it comes swift. Tarrying in that dream realm might bring with it some trouble.” It is Lisa’s warning.
Jean faces hardens - brows together and mouth held tight - in disagreement.
“I have faith—” Jeans says, and Lisa’s pale face lights up at the challenge, “—that the gods would not subject you to any more unnecessary suffering.”
How is it after all these years - after a childhood lost to swordplay and paperwork, after long workdays and additional projects - that Jean still carries in her that unbearably light hope? Diluc cannot see it in himself. Not here in this office, in the very place he’d once lost all faith. He smolders, expectations low.
“We will have to see what they have in store.” It’s a non-answer, but both Jean and Lisa nod with the sort of resignation unique to mortals. The three of them understand – together in that fraught room – that fate is woven asemic in the cloth of all things.
“I know Favonius is a painful place, but please know we are available to you in whatever capacity you need. Not as knights, but as friends,” Jean says.
She is no doubt the eldest sister, Diluc thinks. Her brow settles with weary optimism. That filial guilt, its weight – he certainly recognizes that in himself.
“Kaeya,” Diluc starts, the name taking even him by surprise. His hand stalls at the free end of the linen cloth in the time it takes the thought to full form. “The other day, he came by the winery.”
“Ah, yes. To grab some apple cider?” Jean supplies. She sits down in the carved chair behind her desk. Diluc can only imagine how exhausted she is – he can see hints of it in the way her gaze starts to drift downward, sleep creeping in at the opportunity.
Lisa remains standing beside her. He secures the tea set in the linen cloth and reaches for the leather pouch at his side.
“He spoke of some Favonius event,” Diluc says. “But I don’t recall any notable celebrations in this month from my time here.”
“Is that what he said?” Lisa stifles a small laugh in the heel of her hand. “It was Bennet’s birthday last week.”
“Oh, my apologies,” Diluc says, and the mistake pitches his voice down. “I did not know.” Red encroaches like saxifrage at the corners of his stony expression.
“There is no need for apology. The two of you haven’t properly met.” She rolls her shoulders back and her hand goes to her collar to adjust the wrinkled fabric there. “It was a quiet affair. Not many people celebrated.”
“But Kaeya?”
“He looks after him.”
“Are the Adventurer’s Guild’s sum members not enough to raise a single child?” He says it with more bite than he’d anticipated.
“Perhaps it is less for Bennet’s sake and more for Kaeya’s,” Lisa says. There’s surprising sharpness to her consonants that Diluc knows from books returned too late.
A disquieted pause from Diluc, then his low reply. “Is that so.”
Diluc can sense he’s begun to overstay his welcome. He sees it in Lisa’s narrowing gaze, in Jean’s wilting form.
“Regardless, he is a good mentor in swordplay, even if he has little advice in the way of Pyro manipulation,” is Jean’s meager attempt at mediation.
A wry, meddlesome smile blooms vivid and wide on Lisa’s face.
“Perhaps you would be open to instructing him alongside your brother?”
“Lisa,” Jean’s voice comes out in a quiet hiss from between her white teeth. It’s the closest thing to a sneer he’s seen from her. And then it’s gone, replaced by a sullen and regretful expression.
“I should take my leave,” Diluc says, and performs an awkward cough.
True frustration does not often paint Jean’s features. He knows from their time training together as youths that she reserves anger for quiet moments – when she thinks she’s alone – and that it’s only ever directed inward. Fingernails that bite pink crescents into her palms, a head against the brick wall.
He’d seen her cry only once. It had been after a sparring session between the two of them. Many years ago, even before he became cavalry captain. Diluc hadn’t hit her with his blunted sword – hadn’t even come close – and when she landed the winning blow against his exposed flank, the grand total of all her pressures beaded up at the corners of her eyes in little drops.
Diluc had tried to comfort her, but she’d shrugged away from his hand when it came to rest upon her shoulder. And perhaps it was better that way, for he had yet to learn the true burden of loss, and it would be many years before Jean would grant herself the comfort of another’s touch.
Diluc sighs, muted and mournful with the weight of memory, and Jean looks to the corner of the room as if she can sense where his mind has gone.
Lisa smiles, eyes closed. Diluc senses it does not diminish her seeing.
She is like a lightning rod, Diluc thinks, the way she is able to redirect the energy of a room away from Jean. Not out of a desire for attention but for the sake of Jean’s comfort. He can read past the flirtatious eye rolls, the loose waves of brown that sweep across her long neck. Diluc sees these things for what they are – distractions.
Most of all, it is proven by the way her hand rests, elegant and sure, over Jean’s on the desk.
This is the nature of knighthood: protection. And even if Lisa is relegated to the management of texts in the headquarters’ library, it does not mean she is exempt from that duty. Even if Diluc would have nothing to do with the knights of Favonius, he understands this call. Shield over sword.
The essence of fire is incongruent with the goals of the order of Favonius. It cannot protect. He has seen Kaeya's cryonic shield, and even that - desperate and fractured - fares better in the ranks of knights. To train Bennet in the art of Pyro would be to sentence him to a lifetime of violence, Diluc thinks.
There are few utilities in fire beyond destruction. Diluc has seen the hillsides near his home blackened in the pursuit of justice, and has peeled singed skin from nodules of bone. Diluc wishes there was a sufficient word for the sort of burning that ignites in the body after witnessing death. Smelling it. Perhaps then he could properly explain his reasoning for not wanting to mentor Bennet.
He leaves with a quiet goodbye, and after the door closes behind him, there is nothing but the echoes of his departing footfall.
When Diluc arrives home, he nearly rubs his skin raw trying to wash himself of the essence of memory. Of mercy killing. His skin is scratched with red from the washcloth by the time the sensation of chains is gone.
He looks in the mirror and wonders first if he is redeemable. Second - if a god of war is fit to bestow such salvation.
-
Fruit galettes are a winter-into-spring staple at the estate, but there is no regularity to when they are served. Adelinde seems to bake them at her own behest, and the ingredients vary depending on the market and her mood. Herbs and stone fruit. Sunsettia. Dark shards of chocolate and walnut.
Adelinde beckons Diluc to the dining room one night with that earnest smile – the one he cannot refuse.
“Master Diluc,” she says after they’ve eaten their fill of baked fruit and milled wheat.
“Yes?” He looks up from his empty plate – clean of all crumbs. He’d been staring downward, contemplating porcelain. His mind often ascends the stairs and locks itself away in the guest room. It's a poor habit, a bad coping mechanism, but above there are vague memories. Images he can't quite pull out of his fortress of a mind. Billowing white. A pink scar on a forearm. Kissing these things. "Did you have something on your mind?" Is is his ironic question.
Her fingers rest beside the warm body of a delicate teacup, half-full with black tea despite the late hour. Adelinde is a busy woman with much to do; Diluc does not miss this. Perhaps she and Jean should spend time together.
“I was thinking. Hearing you speak of Liyue’s sights started up some sort of—” Adelinde stops herself there and pushes a stray piece of pink fruit around on the plate. It leaves streaks of cooked sugar and dough in its trail, dirtying the porcelain.
“Adelinde,” Diluc says. “Please continue.”
“I was thinking I should take a vacation.”
It is an unexpected proposition, but certainly not unwelcome.
“Yes.” Diluc pushes his plate to the side and leans forward, elbows coming to rest on the tablecloth. “I agree.”
Adelinde leans back in her chair and Diluc first takes it to mean she is surprised at his approval, but then he sees her eyes tracing invisible lines – reviewing a mental ledger – and recognizes she is accounting for the changes that will have to be made across the estate before her trip. He speaks before she can get lost in it all.
“The estate will feel your absence, but please rest knowing your duties can be relegated to both myself and other staff. As for the dates, please inform me when you have an idea, but don’t feel as if you must stick to any sort of strictness.” Diluc pauses. “We will be flexible.”
Adelinde opens her mouth as if to protest, but instead places her plate on top of Diluc’s. She fidgets in her chair. It creaks accordingly. For a moment Diluc thinks she’s about to stand up to wash the dishes, but then she’s resting her chin on the back of her hand and letting loose a sigh of relief.
“I am grateful,” she says.
Diluc shakes his head.
“You spend too much time here as it is.” Diluc hopes his put-on gruffness comes across as light-hearted as he intends. “My hope is that you go and decide to quit once and for all. Be free of all this.”
Adelinde smiles into her fist. There is a chuckle, maybe, but it’s quiet enough that Diluc’s ears cannot catch it. The both of them know she will never allow herself to detach from the Ragnvindr estate. Diluc’s father haunts many of them, and each person here is burdened in their own way.
But this is not a time for rumination. Diluc reaches over to the tall bell-shaped pot between them and tops off her cup with bergamot tea. She moves forward in her seat until she’s at its edge.
“Tell me,” he says. “What do you wish to do once you’ve arrived?”
-
Diluc does not seek them out that cold morning. It is serendipity or fate or circumstance that leads to him discovering them – swords in their scabbards and cast aside – at the heart of a young grove.
“I did not mean to interrupt.” He doesn't wish to lurk. Diluc moves out from under the dappled shadow of the sparse trees and toward the low grass where Bennet stands, knock-kneed and nervous. He half expects Kaeya to step between them in a cold, protective stance, but he remains leaned up against a tree trunk a few paces behind Bennet.
“Lisa and Jean told me that the two of you have been training.” Diluc says, his manners coloring his voice in warm tones. “Are you finding much success?”
Kaeya grimaces, but doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. Caution pools dark in his eyes. Bennet looks over his shoulder, freckled brow furrowing in inquiry.
Overhead, the trees – naked and soft with dew - shake in the passing wind. Diluc feels similarly exposed. There is much room for error in the grove, in the hairlike grass.
Whatever Bennet is looking for in Kaeya’s frozen over face, he must find, because he turns back to Diluc with a smile of crooked teeth. When he leans forward to speak, he curls into himself a bit. These odd shapes of adolescence, of growing bodies.
“Mister Kaeya says I’m pretty good at with a sword, so now I’m showing him how I like to use my vision.”
Something about the prospect of Kaeya paying a genuine compliment feels both familiar and foreign to Diluc. Sentiment stirs up in his head before he can consent. Like sediment in a wine bottle.
“Interesting,” he says, and he feels ancient for the way his voice sinks low and quiet. He has difficult mustering enthusiasm these days; Diluc hasn’t known how to talk to children since he was also one.
Kaeya glowers at him from his place against the tree’s torso and Diluc is inadvertently reminded that even as a child, he struggled to express himself. Now he is entirely fluent in embarrassed grunts, in incoherence. He is not eloquent; flowers do not pour forth from him as they do with Kazuha.
It is fortunate, then, that Bennet is brimming with enough enthusiasm that even the long, awkward pauses in Diluc’s way of conversing become traversable. The boy is not verbose – no – but he bridges the space between them with anecdotes of Kaeya’s instruction and his own misfortune. Bennet shares with him – in an exaggerated whisper – the story of a training two weeks prior in which Kaeya had tripped over a protruding root and fallen face first into yellow snow. Diluc doesn’t want to chuckle at it – he genuinely resists the sensation. But he catches Kaeya’s pouting across the grove and he’s rendered utterly helpless to Bennet's infectious inhales of laughter.
The three of them - orphans - stand equidistant beneath the gap in the trees. When the forest erupts verdant, Diluc thinks, this area will be idyllic green. The grass should be longer, softer then, and the boughs will be heavy with freshly thatched nests.
“This vision training,” Diluc says once the stirring has subsided in his chest. “I hope it goes well.”
“I could show you." It comes out of Bennet soft and cautious, but it has in it abated excitement. That childlike desire for approval.
“That isn’t necessary,” Diluc says, eyes flitting warily to Kaeya’s to hold only a moment of reciprocated seeing. “It was not my intention to spectate.”
“But you’re a—" A juvenile noise of discontent. "Please?” Bennet says, and he burns with an honesty so bright it cuts into Diluc’s line of sight.
Kaeya’s voice rings out, clear and unexpected from beneath the leafless canopy.
“Go ahead,” is all he says.
Bennet is quick to throw his palm down to the earth. The ground erupts in brilliant vermilion.
Diluc had anticipated opaque flame, something dense and clumsy in accordance with Bennet’s luck, but everything beneath him is alight with red gossamer. His mouth goes slack – just the barest sliver open - in astonishment. There is flame below him, but nothing burns. The grass quivers, dances, twists up in the blushing air. Diluc feels the temperature rise in the pocket of the grove, but it is markedly different than the aftereffect of his own skills. There is no great draft of vertical heat shooting up toward the heavens. No thick curls of invisible blaze that leave virga suspended in the sky.
The red coils incandescent at his feet.
He instinctively glances at Bennet’s hand for any signs of pink blisters, his brow for proof of singed hair. Diluc finds nothing but that smile – naïve and refreshing.
“Don’t be afraid,” Bennet says, and he places his hand back to the earth – through the shimmering red lines - and takes a clump of loamy soil in his glove. It crumbles easily. There are pale seeds and root in the dirt Bennet scatters. Lost in the pulsating color.
Diluc isn’t afraid. Just— flickering with consideration.
Without intending to, Diluc looks directly to Kaeya for he knows not what. Approval, maybe? Proof that he too is caught up in the decayed honey of their shared childhood? An explanation of the strange phenomenon there in the hidden grove? Diluc receives nothing in response, but even that in of itself in answer. He has committed no sins, no missteps here.
He does not know why the thought occurs to him then – that the Cryo archon is the goddess of love.
For the first time, Diluc touches a bare hand to fire and feels pleasure. Thrumming warmth. Like the crook of a body - the space underneath a mother finch’s wing.
-
The bamboo can barely wait for the dissolution of winter. It spears up into the sky as if there is no other direction. To these little sprouts, they know only ascension, and Diluc finds comfort in it. He measures their growth. Each day brings with it new joints and notches in the green stalks. Culm by culm, the bamboo climbs toward Celestia.
He would climb it – if it meant he could face divinity. But the bamboo is not designed to be traversed. It is interested only in itself. Selfish jade poles. He adores them.
On good days, he brings old books to the grove and reads. Pulp fiction from Liyue. Mondstadt newspapers. The ink is fresh enough that it stains his shirt. The newest novels from Fontaine. When Lisa learns of interesting new research from Sumeru, he is the first to hear of it. Little packages arrive in the winery, marked with her cursive. Some of the documents are better suited to the interests of, say, the chief alchemist, but he reads them anyway. It is nice to be thought of.
There is also Snezhnayan folklore, thick with foreign idioms and odd translation, and Natlan recipes – both for medicine and cooking. In Adelinde’s looming absence, these will provide much comfort to Diluc. He folds the corners of pages with recipes that particularly intrigue him. Fish. Stewed fruit. Things he knows would charm Kazuha.
Poems from Inazuma - but prose too, and old newspapers from before the closure of the borders. This is a conscious decision on Diluc’s part. There is still pain in parts of him, and it seems odd to close himself off to it - to make himself prone to it. Measured doses. A few pages at a time. Just enough to sate the yearning without leaning into it.
The bamboo stretches before him. There is an ineffable energy in the company of things that grow quickly, Diluc thinks. Not electric, but plasmatic. Like Bennet's vision. He’d half-expected himself to be envious of the bamboo – or for it to stir up thorny nostalgia in him. But they are models on how to flourish, and he cannot bring himself to resent progress.
Diluc turns to the next page of his journal. Makes note of a word he hadn’t known. He sits up a little straighter.
From inside the estate, Adelinde watches his red shape while a wild berry galette, crowded at the edges with pastry, cools in the windowsill.
Diluc can sense rhizomatic roots beneath the black loam. There is nourishment in places he cannot see, and pale tendrils gather, siphon, drink it. The bamboo is interconnected like fate underneath his boots.
-
When the first breath of it ghosts through the valleys of Mondstadt, collecting in shadowy corners, the seasonal phantom possesses Diluc’s body. Open-mouthed astonishment, the gasp forced from the chest. He steps out from the winery’s paved patio and sees wild pinks beside the quiet rocks, feels Barbatos’ essence in the misted air, watches wayward precipitation dive in the distance. This is no autumn rain – gloomy and impending, with the mournful task of undressing trees. It is the joyous movement of spring, and it draws rain out from the suspended vapor in the skies, diffusing it amongst thirsty seeds and lonely men.
Little blue shapes plummet to the earth. Uncountable.
Rainwater arrives, and Diluc is grateful to be extinguished. To have total respite from his endless smoldering.
-
Diluc enters the dream once more.
The bamboo, for as tall as it is, has not grown. He has come to this world enough times that he is starting to know the winding paths. Tracing the contours of the cobblestone takes him to the abrupt edge of the island – and beyond that those strange, golden ribbons. With no place to properly wedge his foot on the translucent walkways, the ascent upward demands a surprising amount from Diluc’s body, but he is strong, and the air is too temperate for him to sweat.
Off-putting sun, he thinks. Diagonal to him, large enough that it glows uncomfortably close. Watching.
The stairs end, the ribbon wanes. Diluc comes to the apex of the dream – the final island, high in the firmament.
He sees great whorls of grass in the field before him, combed by spun air.
He sees a florid face, mouth open and panting. Lashes in the white shapes of that peeled birch bark, eyes red as its exposed wooden flesh. Glimmering with sap or water or dream.
He sees a bandaged hand. Extended. A blue sword rotating, then blinking into nonexistence.
He sees undone white cloth and a loose drawstring fluttering in the surreal breeze.
Stepping forward comes as naturally as gravity. Speaking does not.
Diluc and Kazuha exchange strange looks, the both of them searching for some proof of authenticity in the other’s eyes, but the air here is clouded with illusion. Although this Kazuha’s movements are exact to his waking counterpart, part of Diluc is cautious. It is a dream, after all – the unnatural glow of this world tells him as much – and living people do not visit each other in dreams. Traversing other realms – it is the stuff of gods. And the dead.
That thought sits poorly in Diluc and he looks away. Fear takes up residence in his transported body.
Kazuha’s hand goes to his, and it feels just as it had each and every other time before. Like a damp breeze catching on his callouses. Diluc’s mind lights up with the vague gestures of memory. A crowded chess table, his back on a wooden cart, red pillars, hot spring water at his thigh. There’s that pesky cloudburst again, he thinks. He flips his hand palm up and takes the dream Kazuha’s fingers between his.
“You were training,” Diluc hears himself say.
He has only a moment to consider the convincing mirage of his wanderer before the hand slips away. Kazuha’s voice comes out, pained and remote.
“Tinted with the dye
that has sunk into my heart
with thoughts of love,
even the clouds I see now
make me think only of you.”
The colors of the sap-colored sky are delivered on the most temperate wafts of open air, and Diluc despises it. He wishes for petrichor, for autumn chill, for even the fierce maw of winter – something to prove to his skin that this location is reachable. That the earth below them is real and shared. But here, the environment imparts little stimulus. It all has a sense of being manufactured, he thinks. There is no other word for it.
All but Kazuha, whose skin is curiously damp with ocean spray, and – Diluc imagines – salty with it too.
Kazuha steps back a few paces and takes in Diluc’s person.
The poem comes out of him through unsure breaths, and Diluc must close his eyes to remember its verses. To deliver it with an adequate cadence.
“That I gaze out so
—my thoughts overflowing with love—
he of course can’t know.
I am the one who has dyed
Those clouds in the evening sky.”
The final word departs his body. He lifts his eyelids up like morning glories and the golden bloom of the dream washes over him momentarily.
Kazuha’s eyes pass over Diluc once, twice, and then in one long and final swoop before he steps back toward Diluc. He runs his knuckles along his chest – shoulder to shoulder.
“You are a convincing facsimile of him,” Kazuha says. “You even have that same scent. Mondstadt soap and old wood.”
“Kazuha,” Diluc says, and his voice is hoarse in his throat. “It is me. This is not false.”
“My mind is cruel to play these tricks on me,” and Kazuha turns away. Diluc’s dreamed body fails in movement. Kazuha’s addition, though quiet and mournful, carries over his shoulder. “But it would not be the first time.”
The dream breaks – like a tree limb snapped off by lightning – and Diluc plunges into the pitch expanse of blind sleep. He feels nothing, senses nothing beyond the leopard-seed blackness of the post-illusory world. He hangs midair, neither falling nor suspended. There are no thoughts, just that full emptiness. Like grass jelly all around him.
Diluc wakes like a drowned man, gasping and reaching upward toward the ivory ceiling. He can still feel the waterlogged weight of the dream at the base of his lungs. Mucous and breath scald him from the inside out.
But beneath the white-hot rebirth of waking, there is another feeling in Diluc. A thought, a chivalric drive. He will learn from Bennet's aplomb optimism. He will drink the tea again. He will show Kazuha his dreams are not restricted by jagged chain and crimson gloom. He will repeat the pattern if fate asks of him to perform the entropic leaving and staying - even in dreams.
There is a brightness to all things, and the fire in Diluc must be destined for more than burning.